Joseph Story Quotes

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest. If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen.

I am persuaded that in the case of elected officials, the overwhelming temptation is to conclude that it is more important for your constituents that you be reelected than that you deal honestly with them.

If the great servants of the public forget their duty, betray their trust and sell their country, or make war against the most valuable rights and privileges of the people; reason and justice require that they should be discarded, and others appointed in their room, without any regard to formal resignations of their forfeited power.

Citizens do not just make up and preserve a Republic; they are its ultimate stakeholders and in fact pillars.

The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.

Our democracy is predicated on the belief that our government should be accessible by the people. We cannot allow ourselves to give in to fear or shy away from interacting with the public.

Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.

People are so docile right now. It is almost as if good government means when the politicians lie to us for our own good, for the public good, and bad government is when politicians lie for their own selfish interests.

Opening up the Capitol dome and giving the public a look at the inner workings of Congress - however messy they may be - certainly won't be pretty. But trust isn't earned by showing off only your Sunday best. The dirty laundry has to be aired, too.

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.

I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.

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.

When people in positions of trust mislead us - either recklessly, negligently or intentionally - that impacts the republic.

If governments did not mislead their citizens so often, there would be less need for secrecy, and if leaders knew they could not rely on keeping the public in the dark about what they are doing, they would have a powerful incentive to behave better.

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbors should be true to the public.

Public business … must always be done by somebody…. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.

The people's government has come to be less and less the people's business.

The evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in the spirit and energy it awakens.

America's experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization, but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

If the chief party ... be corrupt, you must follow their humor and indulge them, and in that case honesty and virtue are pernicious.