Institutional Checks Quotes

Accountability and democratic choice, I deeply believe, are guaranteed by rigorous scrutiny only.

Any bureaucracy must be restrained by law.

How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.

I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand.

What makes a politician accountable is not that there are millions of people who vote, but that there are procedures of government that force him to account for himself.

Democratic institutions are based on a reality of human nature: that those with power, however benign or even noble their intentions, will do what they can to keep it.

Free elections are only one part of democracy. Constraint on the power of government and the rule of law and the institutions of democracy are just as important.

I am very proud of our Supreme Court - it is one of the best worldwide. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, we have seen a certain imbalance in the relationship between the judiciary, the parliament and the government. The Supreme Court behaved in an activist way. We have to debate the degree to which such Supreme Court activism is appropriate.

The real difference between the United States and other nations lies not in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, but in the fact that the substantive clauses of that Constitution are enforced by individuals independent of and not beholden to the elected branches.

[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others.

It's not their job from the establishment-through-calcification to sit there and try to withhold the president, to rein him in or slow down his agenda.

Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader process of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.

They cannot count on the press and they cannot count on Congressional committees to bring the problems of the scientific community to their own attention, or to police the scientific community.

The greatest single virtue of a strong legislature is not what it can do, but what it can prevent.

The BJP must nurture the institutions that put credible checks and balances in place.

In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.