Kent Conrad Quotes

The United States is dangerously close to becoming a democracy instead of a republic.

Control by the majority. Everything else about our government is appendage, it is ornamentation.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it.

We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.

The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.

Our system of government is protected from the cabal of the few and the confusion of the multitude.

The Founding Fathers gladly sacrificed government that could provide speedy, effective, cohesive, and internally consistent policies. They opted for one that had a maximum number of veto points and checks and balances and protections against tyranny by particular officials or tyranny by selfish majorities.

Nobody expects democracy to be efficient--individual freedom was the primary purpose of our founders - but it should function at least a little

The founding fathers set up this country as a republic—not a democracy.

The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

The wisdom and discretion of Congress ... are the restraints on which the people must often rely solely, in all representative governments

The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was, democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither.

I consider biennial elections as a security that the sober, second thought of the people shall be law.

Fierce nomination fights have been going on since the early days of the Republic …. The founding fathers wanted to avoid a monarchy and instead created anarchy.

The Federal government we have today is unimaginable in the perspective of the Americans who debated the ratification of the original constitution.

The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory…

I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.

In democracies, we aren't always governed by the people or the parties that we voted for. But when officials are elected, we must respect their authority, as long as they're exercising that authority within the bounds of whatever regulatory frameworks are in place to guide them.

Congress is the world's oldest deliberative body in the world's oldest democracy. The result of that democracy, and the Constitution on which it rests, are America's laws.

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, 'We, the people.'

I've made the comment that democracies work slower than dictatorships. That's a true thing.

A parliamentary democracy that has developed its delicate balances over hundreds of years will not give up its sovereign rights.