Benjamin Disraeli Quotes

A popular assembly without parties--500 isolated individuals--cannot stand five years against a Minister with an organized Government without becoming a servile Senate.

The parliamentary regime is a regime of parties

Without party, Parliamentary Government is impossible.

All free governments are party governments.

I have long held that this is a one party government, the incumbent party.

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.

The [founding] fathers hoped not to create a system of party government under a constitution, but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

In America, we have a two-party system, and the American Constitution is a piece of brilliance, but they did not know when they set it up we would just have a two-party system. It just so happens that our electorate pushed towards the two-party system because it's a very good way to govern.

The republic has been structured to guard against the cabals of a few as well as against confusion of a multitude, but how each House of Congress would maintain that balance was left to the discretion of the two bodies.

In our form of democracy the expression of the popular will can be effected only through the instrumentality of political parties. We maintain party government not to promote intolerant partisanship but because opportunity must be given for expression of the popular will

If the Congress fails then American democracy is dysfunctional.

I believe in party sponsorship. I believe in Party government as distinguished from personal government, individual, dictatorial, autocratic or what not. In a citizenship of more than 100 million it is impossible to reach an agreement upon all the questions. Parties are formed by those who reach a consensus of opinion.

… the decay of the liberties of the Dutch republic proceeded from three causes: 1. The perfect unanimity requisite on all occasions. 2. Their obligation to consult their constituents. 3. Their voting by provinces. This last destroyed the equality of representation, and the liberties of Great Britain also are sinking from the same defect.

In the executive branch, winning by a whisker is as good as winning in a landslide, but not so in the Senate.

You need the House, you need the Senate and you need the administration. And absent one of them, you're not going to get a heck of a lot done.

Democracy is not about one party dominating.

For students, understanding the separate and unique functions of each branch of government can help them understand how different kinds of government officials can help solve different kinds of problems.

On form of government, there should be checks and balances, and PM should be responsible to Parliament.

I am more convinced than ever that a lively two party system is essential to our democracy.

Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party

The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics…. The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.

The duty of an Opposition is to oppose.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right.

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.