Juan Prim Quotes

The king, in possession of the throne, was the sole representative of sovereignty, the sole representative of power. Not so in a Republic … Here we have no sole representative of power. The ballot box is the instrumentality through which the sovereign power is exercised.

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.

In parliamentary and presidential democracies, the chief executive has been elevated from first among equals to the status of a monarch.

When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy.

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

Our city shall have no more kings!

Democracy is slow … A king can always outrun a congressman.

A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns: not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods.

What government can possibly be better than that of the very best man in the whole state?

The general laws of the kingdom may be enacted only with the consent of the king and the nation. If the king proposes a law, the nation accepts or rejects it; if the nation demands a law, it is for the king to consent or to reject it

If women can rule monarchies they should vote in republics.

As for us BRITONS, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of A PUBLIC and A CONSTITUTION; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic

If France’s first democratic experiment failed, it nevertheless made a profound contribution to the eventual formation of a stable liberal democracy.

There is no place for kings in the new European order

It conducts human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls, which in our time can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy.

The Republic established by the founders was a fragile experiment in a world bestrode by kings, queens, emperors, czars, dictators, and theories of aristocracy.

In America we have no need of kings.

I have established the republic. But today it is not clear whether the form of government is a republic, a dictatorship, or personal rule.

China more than two milleniums ago had already considered the idea of democracy, but at that time she could not put it into operation.

The case for democracy is that voters in the aggregate will make better decisions than a lone monarch or dictator would.

Western people ask me whether it is a paradox that I am King but support democracy. I have to tell them that in Thailand, the King is the guarantor of democracy.

Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall.

This magistrate is not the king. The people are the king.

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.