“Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice — a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.”

Speech in New York City (28 August 1952)

The Oven Bird (1916)
Context: There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Attributed

As quoted in " In the Footsteps of Gandhi: An Interview with Vandana Shiva http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/shiva.html" by Scott London
Context: I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

Unofficial slogan of her work with the Mary Foundation, quoted here during a speech in Estonia http://www.maryfonden.dk/en/node/583 (02 May 2014)

'Snoopers law creates security nightmare' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38134560 (29th November 2016)

Source: 2021, January, Presidential Inaugural Address (2021)

Source: Last Night in Twisted River

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)