Oliver Cromwell Quotes

The purpose of democracy - supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance - is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures

All free governments must consist of two councils, a lesser and a greater.

I'm a patriot, and I think democracy is the best system available. It's very flawed, but it works better than anything else.

India has remained a full, functioning democracy.

Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.

Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.

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

The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of Government. But what is Government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

Now one of two things is true: Either a republic is a desirable form of government, or else it is not.

Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done — we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.

Democracy is better than tyranny.

Consequently, if the republic is the weal of the people, and there is no people if it be not associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and if there is no right where there is no justice, then most certainly it follows that there is no republic where there is no justice.

Liberty, Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order.

If Aristotle, Livy, and Harrington knew what a republic was, the British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. If this definition is just, the British constitution is nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate. This office being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government's being a republic, as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend.

Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarcy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

The King himself should be under no man, but under God and the Law.

As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so it has its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is the curious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to the whole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy.

Democracy is the worst kind of government, I'm sorry. Would you still call yourself a Christian if they elected a new Jesus every four years?

Say, oh well, the Republicans don't like this therefor I shouldn't do it. What kind of a government would that be. We're not a parliamentary system.

We all have more at stake in the rules of the game than we do in the outcomes of the game. When that changes, that's when you begin to lose democracy.

No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'

Democracy is the superior form of government, because it is based on a respect for man as a reasonable being.

Democracy, republics: What do these words signify?