Political Legitimacy Quotes

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

When John Kerry and Zell Miller and George Bush can agree on an issue, you know it's got legs.

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms.

Any person should have enough sense to know that a PM should have public support. Numbers should be with them.

Government legitimacy depends on a public perception of fairness.

Where there is no common power, there is no law

A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.

As the happiness of the people is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it ...

I never believed that surrendering the executive power should be a condition of getting the second term. The second term should stand on its own feet.

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

Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.

The Arab monarchies, especially Jordan and Morocco, are more legitimate than the false republics, with their stolen elections, regime-dominated courts and rubber-stamp parliaments.

Government without a constitution, is a power without a right.

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

No government, no head of government can last if the people feel that this government is not going to defend the security of the country.

Washington is politics! Somehow if people have political objectives, then those objectives are automatically disqualified? If that's the case, the Democrats have no business being legitimized about anything because everything they do is political.

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.

I thought it was a joke at first, but the president did, in fact, authorize an autopen to sign the Patriot Act extension into law. Consider the dangerous precedent this sets. Any number of circumstances could arise in the future where the public could question whether or not the president authorized the use of an autopen.

All governments must maintain power by consent. Not by coercion.

The first duty of our Government to its own citizens and foreigners within its borders is the preservation of order. Unless and until that duty is met a government is not even eligible for recognition among the family of nations.

Putin doesn't conduct elections in the Western sense of elections. This is more accurately probably described as a plebiscite, where people are supposed to express their support for him. The Russian system is not unique in this respect, but it is rather interesting. Here, in the West, the impression that people have is that Putin runs the whole country. This is not so, at all. To a certain extent, you could say that he runs the Kremlin, and this means that it's, in some situations, hard to tell whether it's him running the Kremlin, or the people around him running him.

Almost half of the Turkish population believes it is not legitimate to criticize the government. Interestingly, this correlates with the number of supporters of Erdogan's government.

Governments and citizens blend together only in the imaginations of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens. There is no magic in a ballot box that makes government any less coercive.

I don't want to be president if I have to win by outrage. I don't want to just win. I want to govern, and not just by executive order.