Representative Democracy Quotes

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.

Democracy is a very bad form of government ... but all the others are so much worse.

The people made this government, and not the government the people. Destroy the intelligence of the people, and the government could not exist for a day; — destroy this government, and the people would create another, and yet another, of no less perfect symmetry.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.

The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.

Government of the people and for the people.

The deputies of the people should not and cannot be the people's representatives, they can only be its servants.... The moment that people give power to their representatives, they abdicate their liberty.

The Freedom Caucus represents a pessimistic, divisive, and gerrymandered view of our nation. If America is to make progress, we must step forward from this form of politics - not just because we disagree with this or that policy but because it is fundamentally undemocratic and tyrannical.

That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all amenable to them.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both….

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

A free and democratic society is not the norm. When you look to the history books, world history was not based on great democratic societies but on imperialism, absolute rule, kings, queens, monarchs, dictators.

A country can live under a monarchy or a republic, with a parliamentary or a presidential system, under communism or fascism. But it cannot live in anarchy.

Where there is a free government, and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money.

I’m not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best. We practise it because that’s what the British bequeathed us

The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity. When they assembled, the field of debate presented an ungovernable mob, not only incapable of deliberation, but prepared for every enormity.

Democracy is not a form of government, but a form of social organisation.

One-man-one-vote is a most difficult form of government.. Results can be erratic.

This country is a republic.

Nineteen years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation nor even the whole nation itself assembled can validly extend a debt ... one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.

We have come from the divine right of kings to the divine right of the governed.

Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.

It is by these, the people, that I have been clothed with the high powers which they have seen fit to confide to their Chief Executive, and been charged with the solemn responsibility under which those powers are to be exercised.