A - F

• That democratization has never closely approached its theoretical limits, either in the government of the state or in the government of other institutions, is revealed in the three great historical movement toward democratizing the state.
  • Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (1970; 1990)

• The democratic process in governing a country is not necessarily enhanced by democratizing subsidiary parts of the process.
  • Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (1970; 1990)

• Even in a democratic country, it appears, nondemocratic forms of authority might sometimes be tolerable, perhaps actually desirable
  • Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (1970; 1990)

• Can the international monetary history of the second half of the twentieth century be understood as the further unfolding of Polanyian dynamics, in which democratization again came into conflict with economic liberalization in the form of free capital mobility and fixed exchange rates? Or do recent trends toward floating rates and monetary unification point to ways of reconciling freedom and stability in the two domains?
  • Barry Eichengreen. Globalizing Capital (2008). Chapter 1. Introduction

• Talked at lunch with a gentleman just returned from Japan, who told me some disturbing things about the influences behind our policies of extreme democratization and de-concentration of economic life in Japan.
  Of all the failures of United States policy in the wake of World War II, history will rate as the most grievous our failure to approach realistically the responsibilities of power over the defeated nations which we ourselves courted by the policy of unconditional surrender.
  • George F. Kennan (January 30, 1948) in: The Kennan Diaries, published in 2014.

G - L

• Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution.
  • Andrei Grechko Quoted in "Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse" - Page 58 - by Stephen Kotkin - History - 2001

• The influx of thousands of new amateurs at the close of the nineteenth century and the accompanying expansion of amateur clubs, societies and organizations, produced great unrest among amateur writers and spokesmen. Between 1890 and 1910, manifestos, critiques, rebuttals and arguments dominated society meetings and filled the pages of photography journals. What were the proper goals of photographic practice? What should its standards be? The democratization of photography presented a challenge to previous notions about practice, decorum, aesthetics and appropriate subject matter. A deepening tension grew between an amateur establishment intent on promoting photography as a serious art form and the waves of newcomers who seemed to threaten that legitimization.
  • Griffin (1987, 122) as cited in: Jay Ruby (1999). The world of Francis Cooper. p. 75

• I’m looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I’m not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. It’s a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system.
  • Courtney Love From "Courtney Love does the math", a speech given on the corruption of the music industry, from Salon.com (June 14, 2000)

M - R

• The question concerning the role of the state in preserving territorial integrity is raised by the recent events in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia: why do some multinational states survive the collapse of the authoritarian regime while others do not? Except in Spain, democratization occurred until recently in countries where the integrity of the state was not problematic. The breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia raises a new set of issues because there democratization unleashed movements for national independence; indeed, for some political forces, democratization is synonymous with national self-determination and the breakdown of the multinational state that was maintained by authoritarian rule. Under such conditions, Hobbes's first problem - how to avoid being killed by others - is logically and historically prior to his second problem - how to prevent people within the same community from killing one another.
  • Adam Przeworski, Sustainable Democracy (1995), "Introduction".

• Democratization of commerce is based on everyone having the right to exercise their roles as micro consumers, micro producers, micro entrepreneurs, micro investors, and micro innovators. Access to information removes the first impediment to building this brave, new world. Information asymmetry has always been at the heart of poverty.
  • C.K. Prahalad, (2009) The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. p. 22

• In Mannheim’s post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic conception of democratization, social machinery that is maximally emancipatory, both over time and at any given historical moment, comes into being in a sustainable way only in a permanently revolutionary situation. That situation is one in which groups negotiate for power in a manner that continuously brings new leadership into positions for influencing or making choices for the community. The political process that Mannheim advocates in response to Fascism admits and institutionalizes the need for perpetual instability and uncertainty in order to make freedom possible; without uncertainty, or what Iser calls indeterminacy, is no freedom. Mannheim's political process is a democratized version of Trotsky's idea of "permanent revolution"…
  • John Paul Riquelme, Boston University

S - Z

• "[The democratization of luxury] means more people are going to get better fashion. And the more people who can have fashion, the better.
  • Anna Wintour Reported, quoted by Dana Thomas in Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, The Penguin Press, New York, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59420-129-5