Fenian Party Quotes
Resolved-1st, That the People are the source of all legitimate power; and, That We are the People.
There is a certain redundancy in that “Fenian” means “Party.”
Fenian Party, Ireland, First Resolution of the Revolutionary party, Quoted in Timothy Daniel Sullivan, Recollections of Troubled Times in Irish Politics, 1905
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg "Statue of Robert Hall in Leicester."){kind=small}
For many people the implication of this quotation is that there should be no government secrets withheld from the citizens who have the right to examine. Others argue that government may have temporary secrets to protect against foreign enemies for example, but that these must be declassified very promptly so that the citizens can examine the actions of their government in time to replace the government if they are not satisfied. Almost all government officials tend to reject the first implication out of hand, and grudgingly accept the second with their discretion controlling when declassification should take place. The problem of America is twofold. There is much over-classification (material kept secret that should not be at all), and the time till declassification is long in general and truly absurd in many cases. For example, there are documents from WWII that by 2013 had still not been declassified. See {591444}, {641317}, and {589105} for exemplar views. William Jennings Bryan introduced this principle into the American political dialogue. See {641027}.
See Charles James Fox, John Milton, Jeremy Bentham, Grover Cleveland, Henry Clay, Benjamin Disraeli and Woodrow Wilson for similar expressions of this idea.
