Governmental Legitimacy Quotes

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

There never was a government without force.... A governement leaving it to a man to do his duty, or not, as he pleases, would be a new species of government, or rather no government at all.

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

We need a unifying presence in the central government in Iraq, and so we think the stability and security of Iraq, and especially the central government, is important.

Arab governments, at the end of the day, care most about remaining in power.

[ Donald Trump] deference to the president [Barack Obama] whose legitimacy he questioned.

I'm not holding fast to my position, but to respect the will of the people that decided to choose Saddam Hussein as the leader of the revolution. Therefore, when I say president of the Republic of Iraq, it's not a formality or a holding fast to a position, but rather to reiterate to the Iraqi people that I respect its will.

No policy that does not rest upon philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

No power in the country can dissolve the government.

Tanzania is standing by the people of Zimbabwe including President Mugabe... Mugabe is there, he is president, he has been elected. If Tanzania had simply said, stupid, you're hopeless, a murderer, a violator of basic human rights; does that remove Mugabe from office? It doesn't.

The new Constitution should be ratified in the most unexceptional form, and by the supreme authority of the people themselves.

No one in Washington has yet made a credible case that a post-Assad Syria can hold together.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

… let them who cry up the divine right of Kings consider, that the only form of government which had a proper claim to a divine establishment was so far from including the idea of a King, that it was a high crime for Israel to ask to be in this respect like other nations.

The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies - not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract.

Once one accepts the premise of the Declaration of Independence - that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" - it follows that the governed must, in order to exercise their right of consent, have full freedom of expression.