Political Institutions Quotes

There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions. The failure of these institutions to function and the instability of these regimes in Muslim countries, manifest in frequent changes and coups d'état, is most often the consequence of their a priori opposition to Islam, as the fundamental and foremost feeling of the people in those countries.

A democracy is ... accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.

Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever.

The state is the legal embodiment of the nation. Political institutions are efficient to the extent to which they express and safeguard national interests.

Pakistan's future viability, stability and security lie in empowering its people and building political institutions. My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

I am aware of the fragility of good political institutions. I never take them for granted. I am always attentive to the ways in which, particularly, collective ideologies of purity -- be it religious purity, racial purity, or national purity -- can go wrong.

In the U.S. Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House.

The American political system is a giant bureaucracy.

How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?

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

The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Were there no contrariety of interests, nothing would be more simple and easy than to form and preserve free institutions. The right of suffrage alone would be a sufficient guarantee. It is the conflict of opposing interests which renders it the most difficult work of man.

There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.

I have great respect for British political institutions. I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration.

Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions

As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them.

The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the press, by the pen, all political questions, and to examine and animadvert upon all political institutions ... [is] a right as clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact to their existence, that without is we must fall at once into despotism and anarchy.

The safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.

Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.

I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I'm telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy!

Political science without biography is a form of taxidermy.

Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all.

How our government works... it doesn't.