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We got to get our democracy in order at home, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Two wrongs do not make a right.

— Michael McFaul

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Democracy

More quotes by Michael McFaul

It’s incumbent upon all people to believe in the facts and to keep pushing it. You can’t constrain free speech, but you can speak more loudly about what is factual.

Today, however, Russia and China are united as autocracies. They do have this ideological connection. Both countries have tense relations with the United States and the liberal democratic world, and that brings them together.

I'm 100 percent for lifting sanctions on Russia, provided they change their behavior for why the sanctions were put in place. It’s just that simple.

I hope that from crisis and tragedy comes engagement. Don’t just complain about [an issue], do something about it! Don’t just lament about the current state of affairs, vote!

There is a big academic literature on under what conditions sanctions work and don’t work, on when they can change the behavior of targeted countries. And most times, they don’t work. That’s what the literature says.

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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: Michael McFaul (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.