Bob Graham Quotes

A government may only govern so long as the people, through their representatives, vote it the money to carry on.

All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people.

For more than 500 years -- since the rise of nation-states and parliaments -- a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.

... the grand depository of the democratic principles of the Government ...

The people can never err more than in supporting that by multiplying their representatives beyond a certain limit, they strengthen the barrier against the government of a few.

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.

In republics the executive must be strongest because everything conspires against it, while in monarchies the legislature must be strongest, because everything conspires in favour of the monarch

If the Congress fails then American democracy is dysfunctional.

Congress is the world's oldest deliberative body in the world's oldest democracy. The result of that democracy, and the Constitution on which it rests, are America's laws.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

That fatal drollery called a representative government.

Democracy must learn to defend itself.

It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.

The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.

We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships.

I do strongly believe myself that members of the government who sit in the House of Lords should be accountable to the elected House because otherwise there is a democratic deficit, and that is wrong.

Here, also, has been evolved the form of government consistent with the largest possible civil liberty.

One is actually the democracy here, you know, people are, people assume that this election means that there is democracy in Pakistan. There is no democracy.

I feel that the majority of people should decide for themselves what kind of government they want.

We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.

The virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation. It was not instituted to be a control upon the people, as of late it has been taught

The Turkish state has neither a crowned head nor a dictator.

There have been 2000 Americans who have served in Congress. The people who serve in Congress are no better nor no worse than those in any other American institution.

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.

Logically, in a society ostensibly grounded on representative government, it would seem reasonable that a majority of the people in a State would elect a majority of that State’s legislators.