Theresa May Quotes

With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs.

To enable consensus politics to develop we need to empower people where they live. This means devolving financial resources and political power down to the community level. One of the greatest blocks to movement is fear. This fear can only be removed when people feel their voices are being heard by government and when they have a say in their own lives and communities.

Perhaps democracy should be begun at the local level first. America was many local democracies before democracy came to the national level.

What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.

A majority in all parties do, I think, want to see local government recover its old vigour and independence.

Increased town size hurts real democracy in two ways. First… it dramatically reduces the percentage of citizens who attend town meetings. Second, town size increases the number of citizens who attend, which dramatically reduces the percentage of these attendees who participate.”

The value of democracy lies in the fact that good or bad government has its roots in the localities where people know each other and where they account for their actions to their neighbors.

We want councillors and MPs to be more closely involved in housing issues because this will help to strengthen local democracy and accountability.

I want to see far more decisions taken far closer to the patients, the passengers and the pupils. Far more power for locally and regionally elected politicians who understand best the needs of their areas. And far more say too for the dedicated staff at all levels in health and education.

What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved - versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.

That's what I think regions are about, making central government more accountable and fairer.

The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy. If you want to go towards democracy, the first thing is to involve the people in decision making, not to make it.

I think a lot of things could be handled locally.

But as important as the job to be done by government in the neighborhoods, the people must also be involved.

I'm a great believer in governments doing as little as possible and people power doing the rest, so I'm in favour of governments being there to govern in the areas that need governing, not a whole heap of other things that they stick their sticky fingers into.

I think, in the longer view of things, there is a very powerful pull in the direction of participatory government.

The more responsibility you can move toward local government, the better of you're going to be … City governments do better than their State governments in terms of accountability.

Democracy, in any active sense, begins and ends in communities small enough for their members to meet face to face.

I would rather have 1000 school board members than one president and no school board members.

A government is invigorated when each of us is willing to participate in shaping the future of this nation

13 years after Indonesia began devolving power from the federal government to hundreds of sub provincial units, the link between local and national political interests have become extremely tenuous… although locally elected politicians may be delivering things that people want in their own back yards, they are not, collectively meeting the nation’s needs.

what I love about city government is that the citizens can create whatever kind of city they're willing to build.

Almost all government starts at a very local level at some point.

I hope that we increasingly shift power to local governments.

The White House is not where power comes from in this country. The cities and the local communities of this nation are prepared to save Washington - and not vice versa.