Ksenia Sobchak Quotes

There will be scandals. There will be scandals. And then maybe we can reform again.

Chicago is the largest city in the country without mayoral term limits. This has led to entrenched leaders, a lack of new ideas and creative thinking and a city government that works for the few, not the many.

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

Everyone needs to understand that my work addresses existing problems, and one of the crucial problems in Russia today is corruption.

It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.

I'm not going to reduce the choices of Canadians at the ballot box by backroom deals or secret arrangements. I think that's a cause for cynicism more than anything else.

I think the record shows that as Speaker, I have taken the lead in cleaning up politics.

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.

At the dawn of his administration, President Obama opined: 'A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.' Magical rays of white-hot sunlight emanated from his media-manufactured halo. And then bureaucratically engineered darkness settled over the land.

Nobody is immune to corruption. The difference is in how the society responds to corruption. Are the corrupt in jail as they are in Israel and most democracies. Or are they leaders in the government as in Palestine under the PLO.

We need reform. We need more transparency between those who lobby us and ourselves in the Congress.

Government is like an undershirt. If you don't change it frequently, it begins to stink.

Elections alone will never be enough to ensure good governance.

History shows that more democracy is not a magic pill that will make institutionalized corruption will go away.

No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.

I want either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.

Why is there so much resistance among people who work in the Government to the seemingly obvious fact that, in our democracy, if the Government lies, it will eventually get caught

It's a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy.

Louisiana showed up at the top of a study of political corruption that calculated the number of convictions per capita. Georgia came out as worst on a corruption risk report from the State Integrity Investigation, which measured factors like accountability, transparency and ethics enforcement.

We will use new technology to hard-wire the kind of [transparency] reform and accountability into the culture of government so that it can’t be undone in the next administration.

All politicians will have to change to be worthy of our people.

when greed and fear are linked to power, you have a dangerous mix. We see that in political life. In part of the world, the mix of greed and fear means that those who get power become reluctant to give it back. One of the many things I like and admire in our democracies are the norms that make our leaders hand over power when voters tell them to

We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life.

The biggest issue that we have to contend with is campaign finance reform.

With every new class of representatives that comes to Congress, there is a greater recognition of the perils of private financing of campaigns. I believe that by pulling back the curtain on the daily pressures faced by members of Congress, we can show the public how critical this reform is to the salvation of our democracy.