Benjamin Disraeli Quotes

You cannot choose between party government and Parliamentary government. I say, you can have no Parliamentary government if you have no party government; and, therefore, when Gentlemen denounce party government, they strike at that scheme of government which, in my opinion, has made this country great, and which I hope will keep it great.

The parliamentary regime is a regime of parties

Without party, Parliamentary Government is impossible.

… the decay of the liberties of the Dutch republic proceeded from three causes: 1. The perfect unanimity requisite on all occasions. 2. Their obligation to consult their constituents. 3. Their voting by provinces. This last destroyed the equality of representation, and the liberties of Great Britain also are sinking from the same defect.

There must not be a party monopoly on power.

How is it the community can check ? The community can act only when assembled; and when assembled, it is incapable of acting. The community, however, can choose representatives.

The growth of constitutional government, as we now understand it, was promoted by the establishment of two different sets of machinery for making laws and carrying on government.

In a republic this rule ought to be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power.

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party

For more than 500 years -- since the rise of nation-states and parliaments -- a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.

The people can never err more than in supporting that by multiplying their representatives beyond a certain limit, they strengthen the barrier against the government of a few.

The President of the United States is not the Sovereign of the United States. There is a very near analogy between the position of the President of the United States and that of the Prime Minister of England, and both are paid at much the same rate — the income of a second-class professional man. The Sovereign of the United States is the people;

As for us BRITONS, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of A PUBLIC and A CONSTITUTION; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d.

The [founding] fathers hoped not to create a system of party government under a constitution, but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

In America, we have a two-party system, and the American Constitution is a piece of brilliance, but they did not know when they set it up we would just have a two-party system. It just so happens that our electorate pushed towards the two-party system because it's a very good way to govern.

I am the Federal Government.

How can this full, perfect, just and supreme voice of the people, embodied in the Constitution, be brought to bear, habitually and steadily, in counteracting the fatal tendency of the government to the absolute and despotic control of the numerical majority?

Democracy is when the people keep a government in check.

The practical core of democracy, defined functionally, is the peaceful exchange of power between different groups of powerful political players arranged in parties.

In our system of democracy, our government works on a system of checks and balances. Instead of stripping power from the courts, I believe we should follow the process prescribed in our Constitution - consideration of a Constitutional amendment.

Democracy is not about one party dominating.

On form of government, there should be checks and balances, and PM should be responsible to Parliament.

Maintaining checks and balances on the power of the Judiciary Branch and the other two branches is vital to keep the form of government set up by our Founding Fathers.

What I worry about would be that you essentially have two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply, majoritarian, absolute power on either side. And that's just not what the founders intended.