Gary Chico Quotes

The United States is dangerously close to becoming a democracy instead of a republic.

The founding fathers set up this country as a republic—not a democracy.

If you ever doubt that the people are the boss in a democracy, run for office. Even the President is a hired hand.

I’m not in favor of referendums, and I will never put one before the British people.

This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. Polls give candidates a method to find out what voters want.

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter,to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens and greater sphere of country over which the latter may be extended.

And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction.

The government is just the people acting together.

Polling can undermine the ability of officials to lay out, debate, analyze, and implement their plans. By turning to instant [electronic] polls we would eliminate the captain and the officers and leave every shipboard decision to the passengers.

A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns: not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods.

In this country the government responds to the people, not the other way around.

If we could, somehow, get a vote of the people of Tennessee and have it result properly, it would be worth more to us than a battle gained. How long before we can get such a vote?

Where there is only a national representative government without local self-government, there is no liberty as we understand it

The king, in possession of the throne, was the sole representative of sovereignty, the sole representative of power. Not so in a Republic … Here we have no sole representative of power. The ballot box is the instrumentality through which the sovereign power is exercised.

Building a democracy was not that difficult because we had a tradition of tribal consultations.

Democracy, in brief, requires government by parties because the citizens are too numerous, too ill-informed and too preoccupied to come together spontaneously to choose the policies and leaders they wish to prevail. Political machinery has to be worked. The parties work it.

The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was, democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic

Fierce nomination fights have been going on since the early days of the Republic …. The founding fathers wanted to avoid a monarchy and instead created anarchy.

A republic—if you can keep it.

I believe in decentralized democracy.

Democracy cannot be imagined without Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha, and they cannot be imagined without MPs and MLAs.

It's the public which decides its Chief Minister. We live in a democracy.

That fatal drollery called a representative government.

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.