Alexander Meiklejohn Quotes

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

If certain selected bodies of men, deputed on these principles, determine contrary to the wishes and expectations of their constituents, the people have an undoubted right to reject their decisions, to call for a revision of their conduct, to depute others in their room, or if they think proper, to demand further time for deliberation on matters of the greatest moment: …

The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.

The founders had a strong distrust for centralized power in a federal government. So they created a government with checks and balances. This was to prevent any branch of the government from becoming too powerful.

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

We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.

The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the Court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people.

Loyalty of the law-making power to the executive power was one of the dangers the political fathers foretold.

Government is not a bottom line enterprise. You can get yourself elected ... but you can't fire the legislature if they won't do what you want.

The people are certainly the best judges whether they are well governed.

The Founding Fathers gladly sacrificed government that could provide speedy, effective, cohesive, and internally consistent policies. They opted for one that had a maximum number of veto points and checks and balances and protections against tyranny by particular officials or tyranny by selfish majorities.

The government is just the people acting together.

The first line of the U. S. Constitution is “We the people” … in thriving democracies any time that any player takes a key decision that ignores or evades “We the people” he violates the spirit of democracy and condemns himself to illegitimacy.

Now we are going to have to be a government of men rather than a government of law.

We" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people

Congress is the voice, the conscience, and the judgment of the American people

As for us BRITONS, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of A PUBLIC and A CONSTITUTION; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d.

I trust the American People more than American Institutions.

I consider biennial elections as a security that the sober, second thought of the people shall be law.

We seek to restore the Government of the Republic to the hands of the ‘plain people’ with whom it originated,

Our democratic belief that anyone can be a political leader paradoxically feeds into the anti-democratic belief that we should look to one person to quickly and easily save us. No one, alone, can fix it, and in our system of government, this authoritarian approach is a prescription for catastrophe.

Congress is where Americans are supposed to have our big, messy political fights. That's because the people who make the laws need to be hired and fired by the people. Don't like the laws? Fire the lawmakers.

We the people tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us.

Separation of powers is a problem for foreign policy.

Thank God for the founding fathers, who set up three separate branches of government. And the media acting as the Fourth Estate.