Denise Dresser Quotes

A deep cynicism is taking hold of the country, with more and more Americans convinced that big money calls the shots in Washington and that there is nothing that can be done about it. We must resist that conclusion and fight back on behalf of everyday citizens. Reform is possible, and it is imperative.

Therefore, until the day I die, I am going to do what I can, regardless of the cost to me, to try to stop this awful corruption that is destroying our beloved democracy.

If you cannot reconcile the difference between the elite that stay behind the scene and the right of the people, that's going to be forever chaos. It's time to compromise, to allow more democracy. Those who are stay behind the scenes must hand off and observe the law.

To the contrary, I think we bent over backwards to press for elections and for democratic reform.

Democratic reform, depends less on legislative amendments than on creating a climate of democracy.

We need citizens willing to make Congress accountable for the travesty which passes for government today.

There are over 30,000 lobbyists circling around the 535 members of Congress. The people should have their Senator as their lobbyist.

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

American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany

Signs everywhere now show a great moral awakening—the cleaning out of rotten business & still more rotten policies. But we’ve only begun! For the first time, men were questioning the fundamentals of democracy, inquiring whether we truly had self-government in America, or whether it had been corrupted by selfish interests. This questioning came not alone from what one might call the working class, but from middle America as well.

Serving in the U.S. Congress is about much more than voting on bills. It is about taking on the corporate bullies that taint our democratic process and pushing back when the system is broken.

For too long, America tolerated a 'democratic exception' in the Muslim Middle East. As long as governments were friendly and backed regional stability, there was no need for outsiders to encourage representative government.

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.

Don't vote for Republicans or Democrats until they clean up the open system of bribery that we live under.

That's a question best put to Bernie Sanders himself, but I think that he will probably put forward ideas that are related to the corrupting role of Citizens United and Buckley versus Valeo court decisions and the need to restore a by-and-for-the-people republic envisioned in our Constitution instead of the of-, by- and for-the-most-powerful system that we have right now.

I don't like the current political system in the USA and some other countries. Increasingly democracy has been hijacked by corporate interests.

Our government is built upon the vote. But votes that are purchasable are quicksands, and a government built on them stands upon corruption and revolution.

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.

Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors.History demonstrates that democracy usually follows good governance, not the reverse.

The only tool we have to fix the problems of this country - the democratic process - is itself broken. Which is why nothing will fundamentally change until we solve the problem of money in politics.

We're nowhere near democracy. I've been released, that's all.

I don't see how the people who created the problem can fix it. Texas is worth fighting for, and the best way to fight is to get the politicians out of politics.

I think what it was about was the people's right to vote and have those votes counted. And if you think back through our history, an awful lot of what we've fought over, struggled for, is the right of people to vote. That's what the civil-rights movement was, at its bottom, about. At the fundamental level, democracy means a government in which the people vote.

The people's right to change what does not work is one of the greatest principles in our system of government

A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.