Clay Shirky Quotes

The government is just us.

A messy participatory process is representative democracy at its best.

There's much more we can be doing in Parliament, we could be giving more power back to people at local government level, through local referendums.

Public trust is essential to public safety.

The people must know that from this day on, we want their opinions.

China's environmental conundrums will not be solved by changes within government alone. New mechanisms are needed to allow the communities which may be affected by a given plan, and citizens concerned about the environment, to join in.

Any spending should be debated openly on the floor of the House and voted on in open session, with the American people having a chance to watch and listen.

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

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.”

Democracy is based on the idea that the people rule and that the best decisions are made in public view.

Self government cannot work if the people do not know what their rulers are doing and why.

It is time the American people saw the incredible power of staff members ...and how little power the members who are elected by the people, as opposed to the unelected, have in the decision-making process.

The overarching purpose of access to information legislation … is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry.

Whatever your political leaning, vote. This participation is vital. I feel the same way about issues like the space program, education, the military. The more the public focuses on these things, thinks and forms opinions, I think the better we are as a democracy.

Right to Information is a small concrete step in making our polity more democratic.

Transparency in government, no less than transparency in choosing government, remains a vital national interest in a democracy.

I believe that when it comes to the creation of Sankalp Patra, India in its history has never seen such participation of people.

I believe most of the public should be involved in the election of the leadership.

We are trying to make politics more open. It became a Ukrainian tradition to make decisions behind closed doors.

Politics is a process, and there has to be a continual conversation between those who govern and those who give their consent to be governed.

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The best defence [for a democracy, for the public good] is aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the involved citizen. We need to reassert that slow, time-consuming, inefficient, boring process that requires our involvement; it is called 'being a citizen.' The public good is not something that you can see. It is not static. It is a process. It is the process by which democratic civilizations build themselves.

In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.

Democracy is not about protests. Democracy is about meetings.

An informed public democracy means rule of the people. A media system is absolutely essential to that process, if people are going to be political equals, they to have to have the information and tools so they can actually be participants. That's liberal democracy 101.