The meaning of Democracy according to EB White:

It is the line that forms on the right.  It is the don’t in the don’t shove.  It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat.  Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.  It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.

Democracy is the letter to the editor.  Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth.  It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.  It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.  Democracy is the request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

White wrote this in repsonce to the Writer’s War Baord in July 1943 request that he write a statement on, “the meaning of democracy.”  This quote was found in an autobiographical sketch at the end of The Essays of EB White.  I’m sad that I’m almost at the end of them….good stuff…