Iain Duncan Smith Quotes

Not that I distrust the King, but that I cannot give trust except in a parliamentary way.

The wisdom and discretion of Congress ... are the restraints on which the people must often rely solely, in all representative governments

In a certain sense, and to a certain extent, he [the president] is the representative of the people. He is elected by them, as well as congress is. But can he, in the nature [of] things, know the wants of the people, as well as three hundred other men, coming from all the various localities of the nation? If so, where is the propriety of having a congress?

It is the right of a democratically elected parliament to act in defence of our traditional liberties, and everything should be done to keep it that way.

With the Germans, the sovereignty resided in the great assembly of the people.

Logically, in a society ostensibly grounded on representative government, it would seem reasonable that a majority of the people in a State would elect a majority of that State’s legislators.

The judicial cannot prescribe to the legislative departments of the government limitations upon exercise of its acknowledged powers. The power to tax may be exercised oppressively on persons, but the responsibility … not to the courts, but to the people by whom its members are elected.

A government is not in power. It is in office, put there by the will of the people.

We demand that the House of Representatives shall again become a deliberative body, controlled by the majority of the people's Representatives and not be the Speaker ...

Kings govern by means of popular assemblies only when they cannot do without them.

We have never said that we want to challenge the institution of Parliament.

I actually don't believe in governance by referendum. I believe that we have a democracy, that we elect people to make decisions.

The representatives of people become uncrowned kings and queens once they get into Parliament.

In a parliamentary democracy, it is the job of parliament to decide the law, not the government.

We're going to make sure that the people who run for office and get elected are the ones who are going to work for the American people.

Democracy demands that elected members be able to realize fully the role for which they have been chosen.

I think that the voters should choose the elected officials, not the elected officials choose the voters.

If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

A prime minister's job is to make sure the government works for those who have elected him, and not for big corporations.

Elected representatives are so embedded in the basic notion of what constitutes a democratic nation that it has become indistinguishable from any other form of democratic governance.

No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

The functions of these elders, therefore, determine the power of the people; for a representative is one chosen by others to do in their name what they are entitled to do in their own persons; or rather to exercise the powers which radically inhere in those for whom they act.

The House of Lords has many fine aspects, but at its heart, it is a betrayal of the core democratic principle that those in the enlightened world hold so dear - that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those who must obey those laws.

Representative government demands an ongoing conversation between legislators and constituents.