Franklin Roosevelt: “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”
Jello Biafra: “I’m totally down with insurrection in the street. I’ve had a great time with that over the years. Insurrection in the voting booth is the other part of the equation.”
Robert Kennedy: “The most significant civil rights problem is voting. Each citizen’s right to vote is fundamental to all the other rights of citizenship.”
David Foster Wallace: “If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”
Andrew Young: “Having personally watched the Voting Rights Act being signed into law that August day, I can’t begin to imagine how we could have all been so wrong in believing that more Americans would vote once they were all truly free to do so.”
Jeff Greenfield: “Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: People like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 during the Selma march for voting rights.”
Attributed to anarchist Emma Goldman: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
Abraham Lincoln, quoted by Robert Kennedy 61 days before he was shot: “Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.”
Coretta Scott King: “If American women would increase their voting turnout by 10 percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.”
John Quincy Adams: “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”
Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
Birch Bayh: “I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there.”
Marshall McLuhan: “American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.”
Harry Truman: “When a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.”