Bob Dole Quotes

That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust.

How can we even call this a Democracy when the House, the Senate, the White House, and now the Supreme Court are all controlled by the representatives of a minority group in America?

Democracy is when the people keep a government in check.

The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics…. The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.

The people never have and never will be able to understand how the will of a majority of the House of Representatives can be set aside by the judgment of a few men on a powerful committee.

It is conflict combined with consent, not consent alone, which preserves democracy from eroding into oligarchy.

The Senate is a remarkable institution. It is unique. There is no other body, no other political body, no other democratic legislature in the world quite like the U.S. Senate.

One of the reasons that the Senate was structured and founded the way it is, as opposed to the House, it was designed for gridlock. It was designed to stop massive new laws being passed and voted on daily. It was designed to stop the growth of government.

There was a Republican majority of the Senate, and it tempered the nature of the nominations being made.

No government, be it the most perfect, can stand without strong executive authority.

All societies, including societies called democratic, are ruled by a minority.

Wherever you have votes, you have power.

Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did rule.

Government is everywhere to a great extent controlled by powerful minorities, with an interest distinct from that of the mass of the people.

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.

If government is in the hands of the few, they will tyrannize the many; if in the hands of the many, they will tyrannize over the few. It ought to be in the hands of both, and they should be separated.... They will need a mutual check. This check is a monarch.

We tend to think of the House as a less historically significant legislative body than the Senate. There are more representatives than there are senators, they're up for re-election every two years, and many come and go without having much of an impact.

The Senate is an unknowing world.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.

In the executive branch, winning by a whisker is as good as winning in a landslide, but not so in the Senate.

Were there no contrariety of interests, nothing would be more simple and easy than to form and preserve free institutions. The right of suffrage alone would be a sufficient guarantee. It is the conflict of opposing interests which renders it the most difficult work of man.

Let's say there are 500 sons and daughters like you in each state. Then we could control the government.

Democracy is not about one party dominating.

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.