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Isn’t that the dream of democracy, to allow its dwellers to have a voice? The only way to achieve that is to allow them to appreciate the voices of the past.

— Ilan Stavans Interview (2021)

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Democracy

More quotes by Ilan Stavans

Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey.

A life in two languages is a life experienced twice.

Because you live in two or three worlds doesn't mean you don't live in any of them.

Interview (1999)

Reading a classic, I believe, ought to entail an element of foreignness...Classics are windows into an epoch, not only in content but in form.

Interview (2021)

I don't think Latinos are a separate nation in the U.S. 'We are entering, belonging and sharing that melting pot with many other minority groups.

Interview (1999)

All Ilan Stavans quotes →

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ilan Stavans (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.