Flexible Governance Quotes

A Constitution is not meant to be a flexible arrangement which evolves from one decade to another depending on political expediency.

A constitution … is good for a certain people and for a certain time. It shouldn’t be mummified.

This Constitution was not made for a day, nor is it composed of such flexible materials as to be warped to the purposes of a casually ascendant influence.

Whether it's coming from FDR or it's coming from Ronald Reagan, if the idea is right for the times then we're gonna apply it. And things that don't work we're gonna get rid of.

There are times when one must govern liberally and times when one must be dictatorial.

A government should not function based on the pressures of some or others. It should try to adapt a mix of measures that fits every context and generates the appropriate steps forward.

The creative project of self-government - hard and frustrating but necessary - is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene.

The EU must be able to act with the speed and flexibility of a network, not the cumbersome rigidity of a bloc.

Russia, as well as any other country, does not need dictators, but it needs equitable principles of organizing the state and society: just, effective, flexibly responding to changes inside and outside the country - that is what Russia needs.

Die-hard conservatives thought that if I couldn't get everything I asked for, I should jump off the cliff with the flag flying-go down in flames. No, if I can get 70 or 80 percent of what it is I'm trying to get ... I'll take that and then continue to try to get the rest in the future.

Laws ought to be fashioned unto the manners and conditions of the people whom they are meant to benefit, and not imposed upon them according to the simple rule of right.

This revision of the Constitution will not be perfect. But at least the Constitution will not be inflexible. It will be a step towards the Social Europe which we wish.

Dynamic benign neglect.

Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.

To insert essential principles only, lest the operation of government should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable which ought to be accommodated to times and events.