Institutional Framework Quotes

The desire for a democratic political system does not by itself create the capacity for establishing one.

The government is a machinery manned by human beings.

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Putting the principle of liberty into practice requires institutions: functional legislatures, government bureaucracies, and full-fledged legal system with police, lawyers, prosecutors, and impartial judges…. And the relevant institutions must be firmly anchored in values: people must believe in the importance of protecting … zones of social and civic life from state interference.

The American political system is a giant bureaucracy.

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

If we abandon marriage, we abandon the family.

The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.

Rule of law is the most important element in any civil society. To build a successful country, we need to have rule of law. And rule of law is not just about writing a beautiful constitution or set of laws. It is also about the independence of the judiciary. It’s about institutions. It’s about respect for rights, human rights, social, economic rights, etc.

Culture is more important than rules and regulations.

Government is connected to everything we do.

Democracies do not begin and end with elections.

The bureaucratic method of building an integrated Europe has exhausted its potential.

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

Greece has great strengths, but much of this potential has been wasted. That's because of a wider political system, but also because of a lack of an institutional framework.

The Commission is extremely important. The E.U. without the Commission would not be the European Union.

What I have done is to show the importance for the working of the economic system of what may be termed the institutional structure of production.

The 'community method' can only be applied in those areas in which the European Union actually has competence. Where the community has no competence, the 'community method' clearly cannot be applied.

Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.

Political authority is problematic in Africa because of the blurry dividing line between the public and the private realm. Formal rules matter less than a series of informal institutions that regulate politics.

The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.

Societies are not sustainable without institutions.

The last Hague Conference has in the meantime expressed its opinion that a body should be established which could prepare for the work involved more effectively than has hitherto proved possible.

The state, the state apparatus, is not an abstraction.