Russ Feingold Quotes

You want to represent the country and you want elected officials that are representative of the country.

Legislatures represent people, not acres or trees.

Voters do not decide issues. They decide who will decide issues.

Universal suffrage exists in the United States without producing any frightful consequences.

Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.

There is nothing in our government that the ballot cannot remove or amend. It can make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts.... It can sweep over trusts, syndicates, corporations, monopolies and every other development of the money power.

Most governments and people want reform. It’s the prospect of change that makes reform rare.

Democracy in some ways is a very illogical political system. When you win an election, you have to preserve the institutions that would make it possible for your political enemies to win next time. If you think about it, that's almost antithetical to human nature.

Any of us who wants to go to Parliament must have that responsibility to represent the people who voted us in.

Efforts to reform are often met with resistance because the system always tries to fall back to the status quo and what is comfortable.

My sense was that most of the elected officials in Washington - in their heart of hearts - really believe that the system can't be too bad because it produced them. And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power. We've seen it time after time after time.

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter,to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens and greater sphere of country over which the latter may be extended.

There's always a little bit of friction when you're trying to democratize an industry.

I enjoyed Parliament being a proper elected MP.

How can we even call this a Democracy when the House, the Senate, the White House, and now the Supreme Court are all controlled by the representatives of a minority group in America?

Donald Trump went through the process, he earned the vote, and I am not in support of overturning the will of the voters.

Democracy cannot be imagined without Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha, and they cannot be imagined without MPs and MLAs.

There is a severe shortage in our country of political parties where internal democracy is alive and kicking.

We have 57 choices of ketchup and 500 TV channels. Very nearly everything has been disrupted in the country, from how we buy groceries to how we consume news, except for the system that produces the political leadership of the country.

Only those who vote politicians into power have the right to depose them.

Because we've always done it that way.' During my 12-year tenure as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, I heard those words all too often. The agency, in my experience, has an entrenched management culture resistant to change.

Brazil has no parties, only acronyms.

Although universal suffrage may not be a panacea for all social problems, it does have a profound bearing on the democratic development and governance of a place.

With universal suffrage, every chief executive candidate must face the seven million people of Hong Kong, explain his or her political platform and mission, and win over the people by addressing their interests and concerns.

Elections come and go, people win and lose, that is part of politics. It doesn't anyway change things on the ground.