Stockwell Day Quotes

Every President does it. It goes back to George Washington. I can’t say that past Administrations have asked the same questions, but the end result is the same—you put people on boards that you want.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

It is unfortunate that people believe that in order to democratise something you have to get politicians out of the system.

I expect that after the election and the results that the international community will understand which was the framework of this process and under which law we have done this process.

Organising free and fair elections is more important than the result itself.

The success of any executive measure must now be bought by the use of political patronage in influencing the action of legislators.

Bureaucracy is widespread in the unemployed movement.... There is direct appointment and removals of Unemployed Council functionaries by the Party committees. These functionaries are responsible not to the masses but to the Party committees.

The very existence of government implies inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior of those who are not, as long as he is the repository of power.

The people never have and never will be able to understand how the will of a majority of the House of Representatives can be set aside by the judgment of a few men on a powerful committee.

The ballot box is a license to govern, not a mandate to rule.

People are starting to wake up to the fact that a media/political party-complex basically decide our candidate, then create the illusion for the rest of us that in fact we're the ones who did the deciding.

I think to understand how the democratic process works is the most important thing, so people don't get frightened by it, and get put off, and give up.

This is the democratic process at work, What you're seeing with this process is the Iraqi people embracing American-style democracy.

In recent years... forces have developed in our government over which we have no control, and these forces have an authoritarian approach to justice - meaning, they tell you what justice is.

Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

Folk who don't know why America is the Land of Promise should be here during an election campaign.

One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.

The matter of who governs Zimbabwe is a matter that is in the hands of the people of Zimbabwe. The matter of who governs the people of South Africa is in the hands of the people of South Africa.

The presidency does not yield to definition. Like the glory of a morning sunrise, it can be experienced.

Democracy is messy. It is messy whether you've been doing it since 1789 or whether you're going to do it for the first time in 2005. The trouble with Democracy is, you hold elections. The trouble with dictatorships is...you don't.

Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.

Plainly elites in America don't want democracy. And why should they? Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

Al Gore in 2000. He got a half a million more votes than George Bush and lost. How can that be? It's ridiculous. It's an elitist system. It's so they pick your President. You don't - the people - and it needs to be abolished.

The walk-in privilege, to walk into the Oval Office and have a conversation with the president, is not something that everybody gets.

In such a government as ours no man is appointed to an office because he is the fittest for it--nor hardly in any other government--because there are so many connections and dependencies to be studied.