Richard Cobden Quotes

In what other democracy is the President in charge of the executive and the legislature and the judiciary?

I do not know which is the more preferable, a government composed of several members but sovereign in the country, or a government of a single man with several inferior administrations all having the attributes of constitutional power…. The present government succeeds in combining the worst of both systems by having a infinity of governments all endowed with constitutional laws and separate powers, so that departmental (provincial) councils dispute with the government and the towns and the communes.

What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?

The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.

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

Only that Swiss in the heart want still a king or at least a strong Upper House of Parliament. Swiss long themselves for less democracy and more dictatorship.

In my opinion, the form of Government may be different in different countries, according to their circumstances, their wishes, their wants. England loves her Queen, and has full motive to do so.

Here, also, has been evolved the form of government consistent with the largest possible civil liberty.

Now one of two things is true: Either a republic is a desirable form of government, or else it is not.

Can you get a democracy in Saudi Arabia? These people talk about theocracy, not democracy. So I think it's a very tough situation.

The genius of American government consists of the creative tension between conservatives on the one hand and liberals on the other hand..

All free governments must consist of two councils, a lesser and a greater.

I happen to be one of those people who do not believe in muIti-party democracy.

Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done — we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.

You are apprehensive of monarchy; I of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.

As for us BRITONS, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of A PUBLIC and A CONSTITUTION; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d.

The actual form of our present government is simply a scheme of Congressional supremacy.

There's not a system better than another. There are some people better than others. I'm not anti-democracy, but there's no real system yet that has proven itself to be the right one.

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

A constitution, in the American sense of the word, is a written instrument by which the fundamental powers of the government are established, limited, and defined, and by which these powers are distributed among several departments, for their more safe and useful exercise, for the benefit of the body politic.

But Connecticut and Rhode Island have originally realized the most perfect polity as to a legislature.

Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it.

It is foolishly thought by some that democratical constitutions will not, cannot, last; that the States will quarrel with each other; that a king, or at least a nobility, are indispensable for the prosperity of a nation.

The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded.

Maoists want a directly elected president, but this will give birth to an autocrat.