Nicky Oppenheimer Quotes

I just think we need more accountability and more transparency.

As well-intentioned as it might be, the Ali Act suffers from glaring flaws.

Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.

Let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.

You have to manage a system. The system doesn't manage itself.

I have changed my Ministers but I have not changed my measures.Iamstill formoderation, and Iwill governby it.

Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

Order and system are nobler things than power.

Policy sits above conscience.

Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy

The job of an elected president is to overcome the past and change the playing field.

The purpose of discipline is not to punish, but to correct.

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.

IAR is policy, always has been.

There exist better models of decisionmaking, for the governance of states, corporations and other large organizations, for example in Germany. We need to study such models and promising pathways on which our existing decisionmaking procedures can be gradually reformed.

Who watches the watchmen?

As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.

We really must keep under control, and pretty strict control, the area within which 'The Man in Whitehall' knows best.

The theory of government changes with general progress.

Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.

Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate, or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action, which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey.

Trust is fine, but control is better.

China has a history of thousands of years of feudalism and is still lacking in socialist democracy and socialist legality. We are now working earnestly to cultivate socialist democracy and socialist legality. Only in this way can we solve the problem.