Noun

(-)

Mankind; human beings as a group.

* , chapter=4

, title= Mr. Pratt's Patients , passage=Then he commenced to talk, really talk. and inside of two flaps of a herring's fin he had me mesmerized, like Eben Holt's boy at the town hall show. He talked about the ills of humanity , and the glories of health and Nature and service and land knows what all.}}

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=David Simpson

, volume=188, issue=26, page=36, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Fantasy of navigation , passage=It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: […]; perhaps to moralise on the oneness or fragility of the planet, or to see humanity for the small and circumscribed thing that it is; […].}}

The human condition or nature.

The quality of being benevolent.

Humane traits of character; humane qualities or aspects.

* 1851 , (Herman Melville), (Moby Dick) ,

Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man had a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities !”

Noun

(democracies)

(uncountable) Rule by the people, especially as a form of government; either directly or through elected representatives (representative democracy).

* 1866 , J. Arthur Partridge, On Democracy , Trübner & Co., page 2:

And the essential value and power of Democracy' consists in this,—that it combines, as far as possible, power and organization ; THE SPIRIT, MANHOOD, ''is at one with'' THE BODY, ORGANIZATION. [....] ' Democracy is Government by the People.

* 1901 , The American Historical Review , American Historical Association, page 260:

The period, that is, which marks the transition from absolutism or aristocracy to democracy will mark also the transition from absolutist or autocratic methods of nomination to democratic methods.

* 1921 , James Bryce Bryce, Modern Democracies , The Macmillan Company, page 1:

A century ago there was in the Old World only one tiny spot in which the working of democracy could be studied. A few of the ancient rural cantons of Switzerland had recovered their freedom after the fall of Napoleon, and were governing themselves as they had done from the earlier Middle Ages[...]. Nowhere else in Europe did the people rule.

* 1994 , Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom , Abacus 2010, p. 24:

Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form.

(countable, government) A government under the direct or representative rule of the people of its jurisdiction.

* 2003 , Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad , W. W. Norton & Company, page 13:

In 1900 not a single country had what we would today consider a democracy : a government created by elections in which every adult citizen could vote.

(uncountable) Belief in political freedom and equality; the "spirit of democracy".

* 1918 , Charles Horton Cooley, “A Primary Culture for Democracy”, in Publications of the American Sociological Society 13 , p8

As states of the human spirit democracy , righteousness, and faith have much in common and may be cultivated by the same means...

* 1919 , Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia: Studies in History, Literature and Philosophy , Macmillan, p446

It must further be admitted that he provided a successful interpretation of democracy' in its philosophic aspects when he conceived '''democracy''' as a general outlook on the universe... In Bakunin's conception of ' democracy as religious in character we trace the influence of French socialism.

* 1996 , Petre Roman, The Spirit of Democracy and the Fabric of NATO - The New European Democracies and NATO Enlargement , p1

The spirit of democracy' means, above all, liberty of choice for human beings... ' democracy , in both its individual and collective forms, is the main engine of the eternal human striving for justice and prosperity.