Wangari Maathai Quotes

The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough.

It is not the Government, the members of Parliament to whom the ultimate decision belongs, it is up to you to go forward sure of your sacred right of free opinion, sure of your patriotism.

And I am saying, how about the other two branches? And putting the pressure on our representatives in the Senate and the Congress, and the court system. They should be counter-acting this corruption, but they are sitting there silent.

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons…. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this … work, that is its affair.

The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage…

Look, the people will elect the government they think best.

We the people tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us.

Under my plan, the state will be there to carry out the will of the people, not to dictate to them or to force them to do its will.

The heartbreak of runaway corruption, abuse of power and indefensible criminality by our government and media should, must inspire all good we-the-people Americans to wake the hell up from the embarrassing curse of apathy and start demanding constitutional accountability from our elected employees. How radically non-sheep of me.

I am confident that you brothers in parliament will champion the will of the people over that of the occupier.

If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.

If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.

You can't afford to hate politics. The politics of this country is democracy. Democracy is by the people, of the people and for the people. The day people stop taking active part in the politics of this country, democracy will not survive.

Now more than ever the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.

Democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of their country and themselves.

When a secretary of state illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence, I know that corruption has reached a level like never, ever before in America!

Good governance depends on ability to take responsibility by both administration as well as people.

Representative democracy frequently manifests a disconnect between parliamentarians and the people, so that parliamentarians have agendas that do not correspond with the wishes of the electorate. This has led in many countries to apathy, cynicism and large-scale absenteeism in elections. What is needed is not only parliaments, but parliamentarians who genuinely represent the wishes of the electorate.

The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights.

I refuse to stand by while our democracy is trampled by politicians more concerned about amassing power than helping the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.

There are people working their butts off trying to save our republic and save democracy from the likes of powerful people in the Democrat Party who want to take this country and turn it into a personal little playground for their own private gain.

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.

If you want a government that's going to do the things we ask our government to do, you've got to get it from somebody.

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

Health care's a great example. We spend billions of dollars a year in foreign aid helping people in countries where the money never gets to see the bottom tier, because the bad, corrupt politicians in the government that they have there end up taking what we give them.