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Words of power, passion and persuasion about democracy, old and new
"There is no democracy"
A brief interview with a cleaning lady, at Palácio da Alvorada, the official residence of the president of Brazil, following the 2016 impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff - from Petra Costa's Edge of Democracy (2019)
"Actually, those guys hated democracy"
Anthropologist David Graeber talking about the origins of Democracy in the United States at Occupy Democracy on Parliament Square, Westminster
Hannah Arendt
Representative government has in fact become oligarchic government... the age-old distinction between ruler and ruled which the [American and French] Revolution[s] had set out to abolish through the establishment of a republic has asserted itself again; once more, the people are not admitted to the public realm, once more the business of government has become the privilege of the few
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
The arrangements we call ‘representative democracy’ have become a substitute for popular self-government, not its enactment. Calling them ‘democracy’ only adds insult to injury.
