Elliott Abrams Quotes

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

The Stuart sovereigns of England steadily attempted to strengthen their power, and the resistance to that effort caused an immense growth of Parliamentary influence.

In Jordan, where the prime minister is always a commoner, the king has announced some new reforms that would tend to move the country toward a more democratic system: Notably, the prime minister would emerge from the victorious political party, not from back room conversations in the royal palace.

My personal view is always I'm in favour of anything that gives parliament a greater say. That's after all what we were elected for.

We got our revolution out of the way long before the French and the Americans. The monarchy was restored, but the sovereignty of our parliament, made up of and elected by a slowly widening constituency of the people, has never been seriously challenged since then.

A President in a sense is an elected kingship.

The same effort that would get us Dominion Home Rule will get us a Republic.

We be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so high in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, when we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic.

Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions

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.

The connection and harmony between Great Britain and us, which it is in her interest and ours to cultivate; and on which her prosperity, as well as ours, so materially depends, will be better preserved by the operation of the legal prerogatives of the Crown, than by the exertion of an unlimited authority by Parliament.

Britain is a parliamentary democracy. Power rests in Parliament, in the House of Commons, and the government - the executive - has to seek the consent of MPs for its legislation.

If the Queen can reject the advice of a minister on a little thing like a postage stamp, what would happen if she rejected the advice of the Prime Minister on a major matter? If the Crown personally can reject advice, then, of course, the whole democratic facade turns out to be false

Abolish the monarchy. That is my populist take.

It is a tenet of representative democracy that MPs are not delegates for their constituents. This means that their decisions and actions are ultimately governed by putting the best interests of all their constituency before all else.

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.

Those who care about constitutional development should look beyond universal suffrage for the chief executive election and turn their sights to universal suffrage for Legco as well.

The PRI can afford to push democratization; it can afford to be generous because it has a very good chance of winning in clean elections.

I'm a firm believer that if we could restore real parliamentary democracy, the best way to do that would be to get rid of political parties.

In a democratic country like India, eulogising Rahul Gandhi with the title of Yuvraj is an insult to democracy.

In Burma, our main goal in amending the constitution is not to phase out the military from politics. Our main point is to put the constitution in line with international standards and norms.

Whatever failures may have come to parliamentary government in countries which have not those traditions, and where it is not a natural growth, that is no proof that parliamentary government has failed.

But our perfect democracy, which neither needs nor particularly wants voters, is a rarity. It is important to remember there still exist many other forms of government in the world today, and that dozens of foreign governments still long for a democracy such as ours to be imposed on them.

One-man-one-vote is a most difficult form of government.. Results can be erratic.

I'm just saying that we need to find a better way to manifest the broader society's aspirations, politically. The key to it has to be some sort of proportional representation, which allows there to be more parties.