Charles Trevelyan Quotes

It depends on the consent of the people to decide whether kings or counsuls or other magistrates are to be established in authority over them, and if there is a legitimate cause, the people can change a kingdom into an aristocracy or an aristocracy into a democracy, and vice versa.

I am sensible that there are defects in our federal government, yet they are so much lighter than those of monarchies, that I view them with much indulgence. I rely, too, on the good sense of the people for remedy, whereas the evils of monarchical government are beyond remedy. If any of our countrymen wish for a King, give them Aesop's fable of the frogs who asked a King; if this does not cure them, send them to Europe. They will go back good republicans.

The English king's power was curbed by Parliament, though that wasn't always a good thing, as politicians often behave no better than monarchs - there are just more of them.

Maoists want a directly elected president, but this will give birth to an autocrat.

In our system of government, nobody has the last word except the people.

The Sovereign: The People

Our President is not a King, nor our senate a House of Lords.

Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and Votes by Ballot.

Our form of government is called a democracy because instead of being controlled by a monopoly, it is controlled by the whole people.

The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished.

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.

No one can deny that the Americans are more democratic than the English; yet the government of England feels more directly than that of the United States the force of public opinion. Each has its check on the action of the popular will. In the United States the check is found in narrowing and lengthening the channels by which that will reaches the governing powers; in England it consists of an hereditary crown and an hereditary nobility, which can restrain but cannot thwart the people.

Liberty is best preserved, where the legislative power is lodged in several persons, especially if those persons are of different ranks and interests; for where they are of the same rank, and consequently have an interest to manage peculiar to that rank, it differs but little from a despotical government in a single person.

There is no-one more determined against annual parliaments, universal suffrage and the ballot, than I. My object is … to put an end to such hopes and projects. The ... principle of my reform is, to prevent the necessity of revolution, ... reforming to preserve and not to overthrow.

...institutions like the House of Lords must die, like all other organic beings, when their time comes.

The EU suffers from … a structural democratic deficit. Of its seven institutions, just one—the European Parliament—is directly elected by the people, and it cannot initiate legislation.

Our democratic belief that anyone can be a political leader paradoxically feeds into the anti-democratic belief that we should look to one person to quickly and easily save us. No one, alone, can fix it, and in our system of government, this authoritarian approach is a prescription for catastrophe.

There is a tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty. A lively, meaningful democracy would achieve a balance between the two.

A power of recall that depended solely on the electorate and was not subject to unnecessary hurdles of Parliamentary procedures would show trust in the good sense and fairness of the British people. In return, they might trust Parliamentarians a little more.

The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law - that form of government is usually temporary.

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

Representative democracy betrays the electorate when laws have no roots in the people but in oligarchies. Studies on the concept and modalities of direct democracy are therefore becoming more topical

The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.

The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.

It's not just parliament that requires radical modernisation. It's our democratic processes.