Gandhi on Democracy .......

"The states that are today nominally democratic have either to become frankly totalitarian or, if they are to be truly democratic, they must become courageously non-violent."

"Without the recognition of non-violence on a national scale there is no such thing as a constitutional or democratic government."

"Democratic government is a distant dream so long as non-violence is not recognized as a living force, an inviolable creed, not a mere policy."

"The true democrat is he who with purely non-violent means defends his liberty and therefore his country's and ultimately that of the whole of mankind. In the coming test pacifists have to prove their faith by resolutely refusing to do anything with war .... It follows that such resistance is a matter for each person to decide for himself and under the guidance of an inner voice, if he recognizes its existence."

"There is no escape for any of us save through truth and non-violence. I know that war is wrong, is an unmitigated evil. I know too that it has got to go. I firmly believe that freedom won through bloodshed or fraud is no freedom."

"The case of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty."

"You cannot build non-violence on a factory civilization. .... Rural economy as I have conceived it eschews exploitation altogether, and exploitation is the essence of violence. You have therefore to be rural-minded before you can be non-violent, and to be rural-minded you have to have faith in the spinning wheel."

"That state is perfect and non-violent where the peopleare governed the least. The European democracies are to my mind the negation of Democracy."

"The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy."

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"

"Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood."