Elinor Ostrom Quotes

The essence of government is making necessary choices between competing uses of public resources.

I will commit myself to making this state an even greater place to live, work and raise a family. I intend to reach out from border to border to hear first-hand from our citizens about their thoughts, concerns and ideas for our state.

States have the responsibility to create rules and conditions for growth and development, and to channel the benefits to all citizens by providing education and making people able to participate in the economies, and in decision-making.

I will run an open government that speaks with honesty, seeks opinion, listens to its citizens.

In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions.

No one in government should ever think that the citizens they work for can't or won't scrutinize their actions.

Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.

I joined the city government, and we start to operate as the bureaucrats on the local level, so we were the only ones in the whole Russian team who were experienced in practical bureaucratic management in the complicated condition of 1990.

My philosophy is not a bean-counting, accounting 'look at this.' It is a philosophy that smaller government is better government, and government that is closer to the people is best of all.

People treat citizens like they're some kind of unreliable source, but citizens are data. They are a data set.

Managing a country is like managing a company in many ways. It maybe involves more complicated issues, but it's the same skills.

Citizen participation: a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

Democracy, at its best, enables citizens to debate collectively how the slices of the pie should be divided and to determine which rules apply to private goods and which to public goods.

what I love about city government is that the citizens can create whatever kind of city they're willing to build.

The only way to make government more efficient is to make it smaller and to make it more local.

As the physical, digital, and biological worlds continue to converge, new technologies and platforms will increasingly enable citizens to engage with governments, voice their opinions, coordinate their efforts, and even circumvent the supervision of public authorities.

One of my philosophies is that citizens are the mayor... so we have citizens play an integral role in making policies and implementing them.

An absence of credible information prevents citizens from participating in public decision-making, particularly on key issues of concern such as education, health, and governance.

I'm always trying to invite citizens to participate in the process of public decision-making.

I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology, and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy.

To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.

I think data is incredibly powerful for understanding what people are thinking and for allocating resources.

Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.

The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.

The law can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists. But it isn't, because for those of us who live in democracies, the law begins with us.