Zakaria on democracy

"... eventually people will define democracy by what it has become: a system, open and acessible in theory, but ruled in reality by organized or rich or fanatical minorities, protecting themselves for the present and sacrificing the future. This is a very different vision from that of the enthusiasts of direct democracy, who say that the liberating new world we will live in will harken back to the city-states of ancient Greece. I leave it to the reader to judge whether Californian politics today resembles Athenian democracy in its prime. In any event, it is worth remembering that direct democracy was tried only in a few small cities in ancient Greece where a few thousand men were allowed to vote. It is also worth remembering that within a hundred years all those democracies collapsed into tyranny or chaos—frequently both." 

Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom. Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (WW Norton and Company, 2003), p 255

Henry Kissinger on the limits of democracy in the Middle East

Some states as presently constituted may not be governable except through methods of governance or social cohesion that Americans reject as illegitimate. These limitations can be overcome, in some cases, through evolutions toward a more liberal domestic system. Yet where factions within a state adhere to different concepts of world order for survival, American demands to call off the fight and assemble a democratic coalition government tend either to paralyze the incumbent government (as in the Shah's Iran) or to fall on deaf ears (the Egyptian government led by General SISI - now heeding the lessons of its predecessors' overthrow by tacking away from a historic American alliance in favor of greater freedom of maneuver). 

Henry Kissinger, World Order. Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (Penguin Books 2015) 136