Bev Perdue Quotes

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.

The strength of representative democracy is its ability to slow down those in power who wish to govern by blank cheque, but also those not in power who wish to yank the state about on the sole basis of their self-interest.

The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history yet common in our country.

There will be a new president in this country someday, and I have as good a chance as anybody.

No President should seek a third term, that is if he believes in the continuation of democracy in this country.

It is doubtful that President Mubarak or the Saudi Royal family will allow elections that might sweep them from office.

In times of crisis, we should have a period of 6 months of dictatorship to straighten things up, then return to democracy.

The debate is ended. Fifty percent plus one vote is all we need to govern this country.

One of the cornerstones of our democracy is the peaceful transition of power.

A referendum is almost always a device by which governments get the voters to endorse what they wanted to do all along.

In a perfect world what poor countries at the lowest rungs of economic development need is not a multi-party democracy, but in fact a decisive benevolent dictator to push through the reforms required to get the economy moving

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.

If zero percent of the elites support something, very low chance it's going to pass, if 100% support something, very high chance it's going to pass. Same thing for organized interest groups. But for the average voter, it's a flat line. Which says it doesn't matter whether zero percent of the public believes something or 100% of the average voters believe something - it doesn't affect the probability that that thing will be enacted.

Twenty-one years ago today Saddam Hussein was first elected president of Iraq and he has been re-elected ever since. Apparently they have the same electoral process we do, you don't need the popular vote to win.

The whole point of constitutional democracy is the peaceful transfer of power; of Al Gore passing the baton to George W. Bush, even though that election was very suspiciously called.

It is not our place to decide who should lead the Iraqi people. If Saddam [Hussein] leaves or has to be forced out of power and a new regime brought in, a new leadership brought in, I am confident it will be some combination of people inside the country and outside the country.

One of the things we must be able to agree to is to lose an election and not take to the streets.

If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.

[Donald] Trump is fascism, that's all, so we have to find a way to work it out between Hillary [Clinton] and Bernie [Sanders].

I'm very proud of the fact that Israel is the one country in a very broad radius that - in which Arabs have free and fair elections. That's sacrosanct. That will never change. I wasn't trying to suppress a vote. I was trying to get something to counter a foreign-funded effort to get votes that are intended to topple my party. And I was calling on our voters to come out.

Where is democratic process or popular sovereignty for the endangered population? It cannot be "given" or "allocated" by some other power without that same power claiming the right to withdraw what it gives.

It should be the power of our vote, not the size of our bank accounts, that drives our democracy

I can't think of a scenario under which [Vladimir Putin] would gradually resign from power. For him and those around him, power became a source of unlimited enrichment. A loss of power would be tantamount to an annihilation of the economic success that has been achieved so far.

Rather than a democracy, we increasingly have an elective dictatorship. People are merely permitted to choose who will violate the laws and the Constitution.