Collective Governance Quotes

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

A body politic is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

In matters which concern the common good, a general council chosen by all, to transact business which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole

Their whole civil policy was adverse to concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals.

Politics is a substitute for violence.

… by consenting with others to make one body-politic under government, a man puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it.

Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.

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

Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty.

The government is just us.

Unless the law issues from all of the people, some of the people will feel left out. They will come to feel alienated. They will be angry. And this will not be a cohesive democracy.

The three most beautiful words in the English language: We the people.

Democracy is not simply a question of structures. It is a state of mind. It is an activity.

I am an anarchist in my personal life. I try to live my life in a way that I don't need cops or baby-sitters to keep me from infringing on others. But I don't feel we have evolved far enough as a species to make anarchy work in society itself. We still need government to transfer the wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little, to make sure important projects get done, and keep territorial humans from screwing over and killing each other.

Law principally and properly seeks the common good. Planning for the common good is the task of the whole people or of someone ruling in the person of the whole people. Thus lawmaking is the task of the whole charge of the whole people; for in all other matters direction toward an end is the function of him to whom the end belongs.

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.

It was very much a cry for democratic control at that time. Above all, breaking the accomplished power of a few people to rule the lives of everybody else.

Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

Our sovereign, the people.

Whenever a specially important matter or a great emergency is presented before the Confederate Council and the nature of the matter affects the entire body of the Five Nations, threatening their utter ruin, then the Lords of the Confederacy must submit the matter to the decision of their people and the decision of the people shall affect the decision of the Confederate Council. This decision shall be a confirmation of the voice of the people.

Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity.