Alexander Herzen Quotes

I love the Capitol rotunda. It's just so big and so grand, and I love being in the Capitol at night when it's empty, and you can go stand in the Capitol rotunda and bask in the silence of history. You can sort of imagine all of the things that have happened inside that Rotunda from presidents lying in state to other important events.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

Parliament of Parliaments

We be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so high in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, when we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic.

Constitutions are in politics what paper money is in commerce. They afford great facilities and conveniences. But we must not attribute to them that value which really belongs to what they represent. They are not power, but symbols of power, and will, in an emergency, prove altogether useless unless the power for which they stand be forthcoming.

Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, 'Here I am! I am powerful!' to the world.

Princes rule the people, and their own passions rule Princes; but Providence can over-rule the whole, and draw the instruments of his inscrutable purposes from the vices, no less than the virtues of Kings.

In the cabaret of globalization, the state shows itself as a table dancer that strips off everything until it is left with only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force.

To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

We could not have parliamentary sovereignty with a European Parliament.

Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret.

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP and that's the way it will stay.

Sovereignty and the right to rule cannot be conferred on anyone no matter who ... as a result of an academic discussion. Sovereignty is acquired by force and power and violence.

QUORUM, n. A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have their own way and their own way of having it. In the U.S. Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House.

I don't want the chair of the government because it will be controlled by the U.S. and I don't want to be controlled by the U.S.

Authority, without any condition and reservation, belongs to the nation.

With the shock of war the state comes into its own again.

...Then it said on the news, "And tonight the Prime Minister has just got to Number Ten." I looked down at Jas and said, "Ooer." Meaning he'd got to number ten on the snogging scale. And then we both laughed like loons. Vati just looked at us like we were mad.

There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state.

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do.

I am confident that you brothers in parliament will champion the will of the people over that of the occupier.

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.

You, me...we own this country. Politicians are employees of ours....And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.