Governance Structures Quotes

We are told here today, that what the King of England can't do, the President of the United States can.

You cannot have democracy without the institutions. You cannot have a democracy that is built on the moods of self-interested people.

All the States and Governments by which men are or ever have been ruled, have been and are either Republics or Princedoms.

The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.

If poverty and underdevelopment are primarily consequences of poor institutions, then by weakening those institutions or stunting their development, large aid flows do exactly the opposite of what they are intended to do.

I've got 12 reserves in my riding and have always been very available and worked very diligently on a few files. I've been out any time there is major events. So I've always had an open door policy with the chiefs and individuals on- and off-reserve.

Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover those laws.

In the end, civil wars are about the distribution of power.

Some countries have a parliamentary republic, some are presidential republics and some are still monarchies, but no one sees them as not being democratic. In some countries regional leaders are appointed from the centre and in others they are elected. In Russia, the president is elected through direct secret ballot, and in the United States, the president is elected through a system of electoral colleges.

Institutions are created to address human frailties and human failures to meet human needs, but unfortunately, institutions are staffed by humans, so more institutions are created to address the failures of the original institutions.

Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.

Forms of government become established of themselves. They shape themselves, they are not created. We may give them strength and consistency, but we cannot call them into being. Let us rest assured that the form of government can never be a matter of choice: it is almost always a matter of necessity.

It is acknowledged, namely, that there are in the world three forms of government, autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy: autocracies and oligarchies are administered according to the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to established laws.

When we have run through all forms of government, without partiality to that we were born under, we are at a loss with which to side; they are all a compound of good and evil. It is therefore most reasonable and safe to value that of our own country above all others, and to submit to it.

Politicians who lack the vision to lead the community on big issues like public transport often hide their inaction by blaming other levels of government when anyone complains.

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

… if one person owns the preponderance of land in a given territory, the result is monarchy; if a few own it, we have aristocracy; if the whole people be landlords, it is a commonwealth.

The nicest constitutions of government are often like the finest pieces of clock-work, which, depending on so many motions, are therefore more subject to be out of order.

We have done almost everything in pairs since Noah, except govern. And the world has suffered for it.

It's true that robust governance structures, checks and balances, transparency of markets, directionally leads to... less vulnerability to corruption.

For too long it was assumed that you could completely separate out flows of money from responsibilities and accountabilities in service delivery. This flawed assumption is central to understanding many of the failures.

Our forms of government - though both cast in the democratic pattern - are greatly different. Indeed, sometimes it appears that many of our misunderstandings spring from an imperfect knowledge on the part of both of us of the dissimilarities in our forms of government.

Conflicting legislation and regulations, overlapping mandates, unwillingness to enforce land use, elite capture, entrenched attitudes, and lack of incentives to influence behavior are rife in many resource-rich countries.

One single constitution cannot hold good for each and every republic.

About 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their subjects.