Top 55 Quotes About Representative Government
#1. Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
#2. 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.
Bernard DeVoto
#3. [representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,
Karl Marx
#4. Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#6. Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted, it breaks down representative government and overwhelms democracy.
Ronald Reagan
#7. How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government.
Pankaj Mishra
#8. Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West's winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?
Niall Ferguson
#9. If all goes well, the Iraqis are going to have a country that's going to have a representative government and will be at peace with its neighbors and in the region.
Douglas Feith
#10. The whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.
Margaret Halsey
#11. I expect the notions of personal freedom and representative government would appear radical to a slave of the corporate world." "A
Anthony Ryan
#12. When the people are too much attached to savage independence, to be tolerant of the amount of power to which it is for their good that they should be subject, the state of society is not yet ripe for representative government.
John Stuart Mill
#13. There is a flaw in the operation of representative government. The flaw produces the growth of government.
Allan H. Meltzer
#14. Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.
Edward Abbey
#15. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.
John Stuart Mill
#17. Americans are poorly served by their media, you know, for the war machine and propaganda machine and the global empire and they're poorly served by what they are being told is representative government.
Henry Rollins
#18. For Madison, on the other hand, "a Public Debt is a Public curse," and "in a Representative Government greater than in any other."26
Joseph J. Ellis
#19. I have faith in the future of this promised land of America and in its institutions of representative government, but more than that, I have faith in you, the youth of America, to build even more securely on the foundations laid by the faith and devotion of your pioneer fathers.
Harold B. Lee
#20. We have too much legislating by clamor, by tumult, by pressure. Representative government ceases when outside influence of any kind is substituted for the judgment of the representative.
Calvin Coolidge
#21. Though the Floundering Fathers didn't intend it, we now see that representative government quickly turns into the dictatorship of the proletariat. If you doubt this, I congratulate you on not having a television.
Fred Reed
#22. I trust that the proposed Constitution afford a genuine specimen of representative government and republican government; and that it will answer, in an eminent degree, all the beneficial purposes of society.
Alexander Hamilton
#23. There is one central characteristic of anarchism on the matter of means, and that central principle is a principle of direct action - of not going through the forms that the society offers you, of representative government, of voting, of legislation, but directly taking power.
Howard Zinn
#24. When a government turns from following the will of its people to willing its people to follow - acting according to its own prerogatives - it ceases to be a representative government and instead has transformed into something else. One
Ben Carson
#25. The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security ...
Hugo Black
#26. Representative government demands an ongoing conversation between legislators and constituents.
Alan Siegel
#27. The wreckage of representative government is strewn with broken promises.
Herbert Hoover
#28. The only result of our present system - unless we reverse the drift - must be the gradual extension of the fascist sector and the gradual disappearance of the system of free enterprise under a free representative government.
John T. Flynn
#29. If there have been those who doubted whether a confederated representative democracy were a government competent to the wise and orderly management of the common concerns of a mighty nation, those doubts have been dispelled.
John Quincy Adams
#30. A representative form of government rests nor more on political contributions than on those laws which regulate the descent and transmission of property.
Daniel Webster
#31. Even a very brief tape-delay introduces a form of censorship into the broadcast - not direct governmental control, but it means that a network representative is in effect guessing at what a government might tolerate, which can be even worse.
Frank Pierson
#32. Direct popular government of a state larger than a city state had already failed therefore in Italy, because as yet there was no public education, no press, and no representative system; it had failed though these mere mechanical difficulties, before the first Punic War.
H.G.Wells
#33. Praying men are God's agents on earth, the representative of government of Heaven, set to a specific task on the earth.
Edward McKendree Bounds
#34. Haman is a symbol of a typical ungodly government representative
Sunday Adelaja
#35. We got rid of a terrible dictator. We gave the Iraqi people an opportunity for a new life under a representative form of government.
Colin Powell
#36. It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.
Todd Akin
#37. There are a lot of benefits representative of government and it is far better than any type of dictatorial system and it is far better than a one-man rule situation.
James Bovard
#38. We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people - representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy - the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich," Moyers
Thom Hartmann
#39. Is he aiming at doing anything, or simply undoing what's been done? It's the great misfortune of our government - this paper administration, of which he's a worthy representative.
Leo Tolstoy
#40. The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.
Thomas Paine
#41. I officially designated every US ambassador on earth to be my personal human rights representative, and to have the embassy be a haven for people who suffered from abuse by their own government.
Jimmy Carter
#42. Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
#43. By contrast, China is a repressive regime that denies its citizens the essential freedoms of religion, political dissent and representative self-government.
Todd Akin
#44. The digital revolution has deepened the crisis within representative democracy. But as it forces its demise, it might also dictate its future. Traditional representative democracy within nations is no longer enough. People want more participation and collaboration with their government.
Eduardo Paes
#45. It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.
G.K. Chesterton
#46. So then because some towns in England are not represented, America is to have no representative at all. They are our children; but when children ask for bread we are not to give a stone.
John Bright
#47. Among the popular and representative systems of government I do not approve of the federal system: it is too perfect; and it requires virtues and political talents much superior to our own.
Simon Bolivar
#48. The spread of democracy, the new foundation of the rule of law, and the creation of fledgling representative governments that honor and respect human rights-together these actions spell out the increasing marginalization of the terrorists, as they have fewer and fewer places to run and hide.
John Cornyn
#49. Political leaders or governments owe their position partly to force and partly to popular election. They cannot be regarded as representative of best elements, morally or intellectually, in their respective nations.
Albert Einstein
#50. A newly elected representative quickly discovers that his job in government-aside from making new laws-is to act as a broker, middleman, special pleader and finagler.
William Greider
#51. So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.
Carol Moseley Braun
#52. Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.
John Stuart Mill
#53. I don't know that there is one serious American representative that will advise Israel to sit with a terrorist government and negotiate with them.
Ehud Olmert
#54. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
#55. Of the judicial department of the Government, the Supreme Court is the head and representative, and to it must come for final decision all the great legal questions which may arise under the Constitution, the laws, or the treaties of the United States.
Samuel Freeman Miller
