Nicola Sturgeon Quotes

We need to remind our core supporters that we have not forgotten their concern with the way our democracy is being replaced by European bureaucracy in so many areas.

Brussels has become inefficient and very bureaucratic, which makes it slow to do things. The concept of the United States of Europe will never work.

People feel that the EU is a one-way process, a great machine that sucks up decision-making from national parliaments to the European level until everything is decided by the EU. That needs to change.

As the Eurozone takes steps towards closer fiscal and economic integration, and as the E.U. continues to develop, we need to be absolutely clear when it is most appropriate to take decisions at the national or local level, closer to the people affected, and in other cases when it is best to take action at the E.U. or global level.

In the long run, Europe will certainly move toward unification. But it will be a process of push and pull, and there will be resistance.

Although I wanted to Remain, I know the E.U. is not perfect. I have attended more than enough of its council meetings and read enough of its commission papers to understand its flaws.

I believe that the E.U. should be the union of nation states and that all deepening of ties between the member states cannot go beyond the limits of democracy.

The E.U., its institutions, structure and ways of working are an anachronism.

We have more and more rules coming out of Europe telling us what to do, and I think people are getting a bit fed up with it. This was supposed to be a common market. I don't remember them ever saying we would be governed by Brussels and become a satellite of Europe.

The best way to demonstrate the values of a western democracy is you put Osama bin Laden on trial; you challenge what he says.

Any people has a right to self-determination, and now in Europe the process of diluting national sovereignty in the framework of a united Europe is more accepted.

We've seen over time that countries that have the best economic growth are those that have good governance, and good governance comes from freedom of communication. It comes from ending corruption. It comes from a populace that can go online and say, 'This politician is corrupt, this administrator, or this public official is corrupt.'

Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies.

In the rush to become all things to all people, the federal government has lost sight of its core responsibilities. As a result we're stuck in this frustrating paradox where Washington actually neglects things it's clearly supposed to be doing, while interfering in other areas where they are neither welcome nor authorized.

I do not consider the Lisbon Treaty to be a good thing for Europe, for the freedom of Europe, or for the Czech Republic.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

Openness, transparency - these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt... and that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done.

'Federalism', in the context of political and media usage in Britain, has come to mean the creation and imposition of a European superstate, one centralised in Brussels.

Europe has shown how government can be organised in a network. Its institutions both compete and co-operate and include a directly elected parliament that does not appoint the executive, independent judiciaries and a complex set of relationships between the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament.

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.

So yes, European decision making is not pretty. But it does work.

There is a growing frustration that the EU is seen as something that is done to people rather than acting on their behalf. And this is being intensified by the very solutions required to resolve the economic problems.

I know this isn't a widespread view in the Anglo Saxon world, but I believe that much of the reconciliation between more centralized governance and the scope for democracy - democratic control - will be resolved through an even stronger role of the European Parliament.

I think there are three main values which are fundamental: that Georgia will never be a criminal country, that Georgia will never return to corruption, and that Georgia will be independent.

People feel that the EU is heading in a direction that they never signed up to. They resent the interference in our national life by what they see as unnecessary rules and regulation. And they wonder what the point of it all is. Put simply, many ask 'why can't we just have what we voted to join - a common market?'