Citizen Power Quotes

Citizens are the energy of Seoul.

The people made this government, and not the government the people. Destroy the intelligence of the people, and the government could not exist for a day; — destroy this government, and the people would create another, and yet another, of no less perfect symmetry.

America should be ... a republic in which every citizen is a sovereign, but in which no one cares or dares to wear a crown.

It is not the State that orders us; but it is we who order the State!

I believe that government is for the use of the people, and not the people for the use of the government.

Under a democratical government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.

One of the things that I realized when I left office was that in the 1990's citizens across the world applied more power than they had ever had, as compared with the government, because of more people living under democracies than dictatorships for the first time, the power of the internet, which the young Chinese used to basically change China's policy on the SARS epidemic, and shut it down, and because of the rise in non-governmental organizations like my foundation.

Here sir, the people govern.

Before my tenure, people didn't seem to think that citizens had a right to limit the size of their government.

Without democracy, we are voiceless subjects. But with it, we are citizens armed with the power to change our destinies.

One citizen, or a few, may be powerless if all the rest are determined to benefit from the imposition of unjust supranational rules. But this excuse cannot work for large numbers. Just imagine 10 million US citizens saying in unison: "I am just one powerless citizen. There is nothing I can do to change my government's policies!"

The principle of democracy is all about delegation of power by the vast majority of citizens through a few chosen representatives chosen on merit and competence.

It's a one-day story of a guy called Newton Kumar, and the backdrop is election: how the most powerful tool we have as citizens is vote but how we don't utilise it. We really don't give importance to it. It talks about democracy; it's a satire, a black comedy.

There is nothing beyond the reach of ordinary citizens doing the daily work of democracy, and no problem too great to tackle with the power of active citizenship.

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.

A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.

I tell people, 'If you want to send a message to the White House, call my house.'

The American Government will be what we all make of it.

At the end of the day, the government, local government all bow to public pressure.

The leverage and influence social media gives citizens are rapidly spreading into the business world.

Police states cannot endure under the advance of the computer because it increases the power of the people far faster than the powers of surveillance.

And in a democracy, when we say we're mad at what's going on, what we need to be saying is we're mad at ourselves.

Democracy is about aggregating the collective power of citizens to speak in their behalf.

A small group of motivated citizens can potentially have as much influence as a lobby group spending millions of dollars.

Only a knowledgeable, empowered and vocal citizenry can perform well in democracy.