It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Tom Stoppard
Jumpers (1972)

Update: According to commenter Eric Lombroso, Stoppard lifted this quote from Stalin, but according to this article, there's no documentation that Stalin ever said it. My own search in the dozen or so quotation references I own showed no sign of Stalin's being attached to it, and, indeed, two sources (The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition, and Who Said What), both explicitly attribute it to Stoppard. The Oxford cross-references this quote from Anatasio Somaza, the Nicaraguan dictator, from 1977 (five years after Stoppard's play was first presented): "You won the election, but I won the count."

Stalin's attributed quotes are significantly less pithy, stuff like "The State is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class, used to break the resistance of the adversaries of that class," and "Gratitude...is a sickness suffered by dogs." Now, that sounds more like the dictator we all know and loathe.

It's interesting to note that the quotes about democracy I came across while looking into this ran about 2 to 1 against! Oh, alright, not against really, it's just that there were twice as many quotes disparaging democracy or warning about its dangers as there were those extolling its virtues. In the end, though, we're left with Churchill's famous remark about it being the worst of all possible systems, except for all the others.

One that caught my attention was this:

Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political -- legislative and administrative -- decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.

Joseph A Schumpeter
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

Given the current confusion about the goals of the War On Terror -- seeing as terrorism is a method and is not therefore capable of being "defeated" -- it's worth keeping in mind that what would have been nice to have come out of the Iraq invasion (but is exceedingly unlikely to) is not necessarily a Western-style democracy, but the condition that we have come to associate with that political method: a stable, relatively liberal, relatively representative country that can interact with other countries as a good citizen of the world. Trying to impose a democracy by force was an outlandish goal to begin with, not because Arabs or Muslims are incapable of democracy, but because achieving a democratic state is a long-term process. You really can't hurry it along, because what you end up with is a sham democracy with all of the outward apparatus but none of the qualities of the real thing.

Perhaps Holland, Dozier and Holland (through Diana Ross and the Supremes) said it best:

You can't hurry love
No, you just have to wait
She said love don't come easy
It's a game of give and take

You can't hurry love
No, you just have to wait
You got to trust, give it time
No matter how long it takes

Note (4/29): This entry accidentally lost through operator error, but subsequently re-constructed using the Google cached copy of the original.