Quotes About Checks And Balances

#1. In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system,
non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor,
judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's
order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.

William Safire

#2. There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.

Daniel Inouye

#3. Procrastination and impatience form a system of checks and balances.

Mason Cooley

#4. Maintaining checks and balances on the power of the Judiciary Branch and the other two branches is vital to keep the form of government set up by our Founding Fathers.

Todd Tiahrt

#5. The basic premise of the Constitution was a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances because man was perceived as a fallen creature and would always yearn for more power.

Roy Moore

#6. The checks and balances is a way to prevent government from either devolving into an autocratic tyranny or an autocratic mob mentality.

Beau Willimon

#7. In our system of democracy, our government works on a system of checks and balances. Instead of stripping power from the courts, I believe we should follow the process prescribed in our Constitution - consideration of a Constitutional amendment.

Dennis Cardoza

#8. [Magna Carta provided] a system of checks and balances which would accord the monarchy its necessary strength, but would prevent its perversion by a tyrant or a fool.

Winston Churchill

#9. Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we're in a battle between tyranny and freedom - it's a series of pendulum swings.

Jon Stewart

#10. On form of government, there should be checks and balances, and PM should be responsible to Parliament.

Sushil Koirala

#11. The founders had a strong distrust for centralized power in a federal government. So they created a government with checks and balances. This was to prevent any branch of the government from becoming too powerful.

Ezra Taft Benson

#12. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

Jonathan Turley

#13. There are checks and balances and broad separation of powers under the Constitution. Each organ of the State, i.e. the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, must have respect for the others and not encroach into each other's domain.

P. Sathasivam

#14. One of the things you learn as a journalist is that when there's no accountability, we humans are capable of tremendous avarice and venality. That's true of union bosses - and of corporate tycoons. Unions, even flawed ones, can provide checks and balances for flawed corporations.

Nicholas Kristof

#15. Politicians, in many cases - their moral code will be dictated by what can get them reelected, what they can get away with. When you're out of office, I guess you're freed from those checks and balances.

Mark Leibovich

#16. Rather than signalling the aspiration for system of checks and balances against absolute power, democracy become a euphemism for majority rule.

Peter Mansfield

#17. We need a return to transparency and a system of checks and balances, to a president who respects Congress' role of oversight and accountability.

Hillary Clinton

#18. I am running to fix the economy, restore the constitutional system of checks and balances and to end this game of crony capitalism by the ruling class in Washington.

Dave Brat

#19. Why can't Google, which likes to see itself as a 'Don't Be Evil' benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories?

Maureen Dowd

#20. When war transcends all boundaries, do the legal and moral categories we have relied upon to channel and constrain violence and coercion lose all value? Do we lose the checks and balances essential to preserving individual liberty and the rule of law? Or

Rosa Brooks

#21. It's really not a stretch. The checks and balances are the same. The drums are the executive branch. The jazz orchestra is the legislative branch. Logic and reason are like jazz solos. The bass player is the judicial branch. One our greatest ever is Milt Hinton, and his nickname is "The Judge."

Wynton Marsalis

#22. Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.

Andy Miller

#23. There are certain people within the new government who have a slightly disturbing tendency toward authoritarianism, but there are so many checks and balances that in that way their noises are just noises.

Jonathan Shapiro

#24. There are checks and balances in science. There's somebody checking the people doing the science, and then there's somebody who checks the checkers and somebody who checks the checker's checkers.

Michael Shermer

#25. In summary, the Romans were opposed to tyranny in any form; and the feature of government to which they gave the most thought was an elaborate system of checks and balances.

Robert W. Welch Jr.

#26. I think umpires have too much power, without any system of checks and balances and the more money a player makes, the more the umpire tries to show off that power to him. Unfortunately, since I signed my contract my strike zone has suddenly become a lot larger.

Ozzie Smith

#27. Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment.

Greg Graffin

#28. Absolute power has corrupted and the absence of checks and balances seems complete.

Patricia Cornwell

#29. Technology makes good DJ's better, but also allows your average person to think they're a DJ, and unfortunately there's no checks and balances about people making it a career.

Neil Armstrong

#30. Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.

Thomas Sowell

#31. The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,

Harry Reid

#32. This used to be a government of checks and balances. Now it's all checks and no balances.

Gracie Allen

#33. This is a time when the protections of Americans' liberties are directly at risk, as are the checks and balances that have served to constrain abuses of power for more than 200 years. The Supreme Court is relied upon by all of to us protect our fundamental rights.

Patrick Leahy

#34. As a member of Congress, I believe Congress must provide oversight of actions by the Executive Branch as our system of checks and balances requires.

Charles B. Rangel

#35. We're somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don't have these checks and balances.

Jan Koum

#36. When you're elected to Congress, you take a vow to uphold the Constitution and its system of checks and balances. That vow doesn't say, 'Unless it's politically uncomfortable.'

Chellie Pingree

#37. Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life - all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.

Henry Beston

#38. You can't become a dictator through checks and balances.

Tommy Chong

#39. I'll always understand the Schadenfreude aspect to short-selling. I get that no one will always like it. I'm also convinced to the deepest part of my bones that short-selling plays the role of real-time financial watchdog. It's one of the few checks and balances in the market.

James Chanos

#40. We must have systems of checks and balances to make sure that those people who are making critical decisions for our country are held accountable, and nowhere is that more important than in the area of national security.

Chris Van Hollen

#41. Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.

Jonah Goldberg

#42. Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants.

James F. Cooper

#43. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.

Rachel Carson

#44. Suddenly, we humans - a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature - have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power.

Paul MacCready

#45. The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.

Nathan Myhrvold

#46. Life is a series of checks and balances, sowing and reaping.

Jessica Nelson

#47. Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

Steve Allen

#48. The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim.

David Ignatius

#49. I think most of us in America want our security. There're so many people out there that are fearful and now with this realization of immigration, with the terrorists, we need to have better checks and balances in regards to who's emigrating into our country.

Jan Brewer

#50. Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

Marvin Minsky

#51. Unlike Confucius, Madison maintained that people have a limited capacity to control their passions themselves and act virtuously when their individual interests conflict with others.

Patrick Mendis

#52. The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

James Madison

#53. When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.

Thomas Carlyle

#54. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

James Madison