It is no easy matter to make democracy live and to live by democracy for a country grappling with the tremendous difficulties and handicaps of being at the stage of development. The temptation may often be aroused, in the face of such difficulties, to look for deceptive short cuts that unwittingly may cause the society to drift away from the course of democracy – a course that requires patience, perseverance and tolerance.

Democracy can exist only when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some things you might want for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way.

It is a testing time for democracy...Democracy, democratic government, calls for harder work, for higher education, for further vision than any form of government known in this world. It has not lasted long yet in the West, and it is only by those like ourselves who believe in it making it a success that we can hope to see it permanent and yielding those fruits which it ought to yield. The assertion of people's rights has never yet provided that people with bread. The performance of their duties, and that alone, can lead to the successful issue of those experiments in government which we have carried further than any other people in this world. Democracy can rise to great heights; it can also sink to great depths. It is for us so to conduct ourselves, and so to educate our own people, that we may achieve the heights and avoid the depths.

The difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals.

I am deeply democratic, I respect people who do not share my ideas or my way of seeing things.

The beauty of democracy is that you learn to disagree to agree, you learn to make concessions, you learn to tolerate dissenting views.

In democracy, it's a continuing struggle of convincing the other person to see things the way you do. You may succeed in doing that during one particular election then fail in the next.

But we must accept the challenge that all of us in democratic governments face: to listen to the voices who disagree with us; to have an open debate about how we use our powers and how we must constrain them; and to always remember that government exists to serve the power of the individual, and not the other way around. That’s what makes us who we are, and that’s what makes us different from those on the other side of the wall.

you will know that it is a more difficult work to reject the opinion of others than to establish your own.

In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.

Exactly. Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What your Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

But if our democracy is to flourish it must have criticism, if our government is to function it must have dissent. Only totalitarian governments insist upon conformity and they—as we know—do so at their peril.

Some observers feel it is harder to change public opinion in democracies than it is to change policies in totalitarian countries.