Gouverneur Morris Quotes

Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.

Oppositions clean and purify those in office and we in the opposition are in fact the detergents of democracy.

By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.

Is the Justice Department incapable of regulating itself? Without strong regulation, the privileges we give them to investigate us, to conduct their normal anti-crime things, can spiral out of control.

The government itself is — and should be — accountable when its officials run amok.

We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk.

An obvious precaution against the corruption of power is to divide the government.

Republics can commit no greater error than to adopt or continue any feature in their systems of government which may be calculated to create or increase the lover of power in the bosoms of those to whom necessity obliges them to commit the management of their affairs.

These are issues we've been grappling with since the Constitution was written: how you hold your government to account for its words and deeds. It's all about power and the abuse of power.

Reddit is like any democratic form of government - unless carefully guarded by its leaders and members, its trusts and privileges can be and often are abused.

Surveillance of power is one of the most important ways to ensure that power does not abuse its status. But, of course, power does not like to be watched.

My nature is that when I see abuses of power, I want to expose those abuses.

It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.

Whether people care enough about local news to pay for it is, sadly, an entirely different question than whether our democracy requires a strong watchdog function at the local level to ensure safeguards against abuse, chicanery, and outright dishonesty.

Government will no longer be run on the whims of individuals.

A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.

We must have systems of checks and balances to make sure that those people who are making critical decisions for our country are held accountable, and nowhere is that more important than in the area of national security.

The difference between a democracy and other forms of government is not that in a democracy bad things do not happen. The difference is that in a democracy something will be done about it and someone will be held to account.

The power to investigate and prosecute is the power to destroy.

Our system of checks and balances .... The people keep the politicians from stealing too much, and the politicians keep the people from getting too crazy.

Whistleblowers are moral narcissists who dread living with the corrupted self more than being shunned by others.

In order to prevent those, who are vested with authority, from becoming oppressors, the people have a right, at such periods and in such manner as they shall establish by their frame of government, to cause their public officers to return to private life; and to fill up vacant places by certain and regular elections and appointments.

What makes a politician accountable is not that there are millions of people who vote, but that there are procedures of government that force him to account for himself.

We are a nation founded on distrust of government power, and questioning that power is essential to promoting transparency and accountability.

A fierce and principled opposition stops a fat, complacent government from making stupid mistakes.