Top 55 Quotes About Executive Power
#1. I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found. I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.
Howard Dean
#2. I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.
Noam Chomsky
#3. A representative assembly, although extremely well qualified, and absolutely necessary, as a branch of the legislative, is unfit to exercise the executive power, for want of two essential properties, secrecy and dispatch.
John Adams
#4. Loyalty of the law-making power to the executive power was one of the dangers the political fathers foretold.
Garet Garrett
#5. There is also the issue of personal privacy when it comes the executive power. Throughout our nation's history, whether it was habeas corpus during the Civil War, Alien and Sedition Acts in World War I, or Japanese internment camps in World War II, presidents have gone too far.
Dick Durbin
#6. Concentration of executive power, unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances, let's say fighting world war two, it's an assault on democracy.
Noam Chomsky
#7. Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.
Nick Harkaway
#8. All these massive executive-power-consolidating, pound-you-up-the-fanny-whenever-the-urge-so-takes-me directives could simply be ordered not to exist anymore by me, as your next president, with the simple stroke of my pen. So
Cintra Wilson
#9. Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.
Karl Marx
#10. Executive power is exercised by the President of the Governing Board who, with the title of President of the Republic of Chile, administers the state and is the Supreme Chief of the Nation.
Augusto Pinochet
#11. The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible.
Steve Stockman
#12. More fundamentally, however, the answer to petitioners' objection is that there can be no impairment of executive power, whether on the state or federal level, where actions pursuant to that power are impermissible under the Constitution. Where there is no power, there can be no impairment of power.
William J. Brennan
#13. It was settled by the Constitution, the laws, and the whole practice of the government that the entire executive power is vested in the President of the United States.
Andrew Jackson
#14. To me, Los Angeles and California and executive power are about big, open warehouse buildings. Tech companies are buying oversized buildings, because they project growth immediately.
James Pearse Connelly
#15. Making recess appointments when the Senate isn't in recess is neither rational nor moderate. It's a raw misuse of executive power by a president whose love of government is his most vulnerable spot with the electorate.
John Podhoretz
#16. The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.
Michael Parenti
#17. 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.
Jim Gilmore
#18. Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.
Immanuel Kant
#20. The Independent or Congregational theory includes two principles; first, that the governing and executive power in the Church is in the brotherhood; and secondly, that the Church organization is complete in each worshipping assembly, which is independent of every other.
Charles Hodge
#21. A good president does with executive power what Pablo Picasso did with paint. He takes bills into new and slightly discomfiting territory. He puts extra eyes on policies. He moves the mouth of the Supreme Court from where it should be to where it must be.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#22. When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically. . . .
Mark R. Levin
#23. Listen
strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Michael Palin
#24. The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
Daniel Webster
#25. What's brilliant about the United States system of government is separation of power. Not only the executive, legislative, judicial branches, but also the independence of the military from civilians, an independent media and press, an independent central bank.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
#26. It is one thing to be subordinate to the laws, and another [for the Executive] to be dependent on the legislative body. The first comports with, the last violates, the fundamental principles of good government; and, whatever may be the forms of the Constitution, unites all power in the same hands.
Alexander Hamilton
#27. The dangers of unexamined and unregulated monopoly power, particularly in the state executive, are hardly news. The right reaction is not passive acquiescence.
Noam Chomsky
#28. The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
Edward Gibbon
#29. We have already given in example one effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body
Thomas Jefferson
#30. In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.
Baron De Montesquieu
#31. Kid gets caught with marijuana, that kid has a police record. A Wall Street executive destroys the economy, $5 billion settlement with the government, no criminal record. That is what power is about. That is what corruption is about. And that is what has to change in the United States of America.
Bernie Sanders
#32. There's no faster way or surer way to consolidate power and disenfranchise critics than to operate in secret. So this plays squarely into the promotion of the unitary executive. That's one factor.
Ted Gup
#33. Testimony of all ages forces us to admit that war is among the most dangerous enemies to liberty, and that the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches of Power.
James Madison
#34. There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive.
Ludwig Von Mises
#35. In an era where the White House is abusing power, is excusing and authorizing torture and is spying on American citizens, I find Judge [Samuel] Alito's support for an all-powerful executive branch to be genuinely troubling.
Samuel Alito
#36. The extraordinary power of influence is now within everyone's reach. Recent graduates, executive assistants, project managers, and business leaders can all benefit from Monarth's simple steps for 'getting everyone to follow your lead.'
Marshall Goldsmith
#37. The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
Winston S. Churchill
#38. Our Founding Fathers created the Executive Branch to implement and enforce the laws written by Congress, and vested this power in the president.
Tom Rice
#39. Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#40. The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.
Garry Wills
#41. In many cases, Obama's exercise of authoritarian power is criminal. His executive branch is responsible for violations of the Arms Export Control Act in shipping weapons to Syria, the Espionage Act in Libya, and IRS law with regard to the targeting of conservative groups.
Ben Shapiro
#42. The danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations.
James Madison
#43. The power given by the Constitution to the Executive to interpose his veto is a high conservative power; but in my opinion it should never be exercised except in cases of clear violation of the Constitution, or manifest haste and want of due consideration by Congress.
Zachary Taylor
#44. The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.
James Madison
#45. EXECUTIVE, n. An officer of the Government, whose duty it is to enforce the wishes of the legislative power until such time as the judicial department shall be pleased to pronounce them invalid and of no effect.
Ambrose Bierce
#46. The Constitution's pretty clear. The Federalist papers are pretty clear ... They very specifically delegated the power to declare war to Congress. They wanted this to be a congressional decision; they did not want war to be engaged in by the executive without approval of Congress.
Rand Paul
#47. Bush violated FISA [ ... ] because he wanted to violate the law in order to establish the general 'principle' that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law.
Glenn Greenwald
#48. Civilization has developed executive powers far beyond its understanding.
Maude Meagher
#49. You don't just give the executive branch unlimited resources, unlimited power. Our founders were very concerned about too much power being invested in any one, in any branch. The balance of power is fundamental to our system.
Mike Huckabee
#50. The real power in Ottawa, as in Washington, is in the executive branch. At the White House, there are daily briefings for reporters. In Ottawa, there is no such daily access. The media doesn't demand it, and as a result, major powerbrokers remain virtually anonymous.
Lawrence Martin
#51. The power of declaring war being with the Legislature, the Executive should do nothing necessarily committing them to decide for war in preference of non-intercourse, which will be preferred by a great many.
Thomas Jefferson
#52. When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.
Ernest Hemingway,
#53. Develop your leaders into a competitive advantage. Reconnect your leader-power to success.
Gene Morton
#54. If the president uses executive orders to legislate new laws, that would be an example of him subverting legislative power from Congress, and might be considered a gross perversion of the Constitution.
Gary Hansen
#55. In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War.
Alexander Hamilton
