Institutional Stability Quotes

I sincerely wish we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles.

A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

Liberal institutions soon cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established.

The most important detail separating the West from the East is the existence of administrators who are able to give up power. Former presidents, prime ministers and deputies must be reconciled to leaving power.

Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.

We have throughout our history been tested when it comes to the institutions of our democracy. And thank God our forefathers were smart enough to establish a government of checks and balances to make sure that power cannot be centralized in any one branch of government. And those institutions have proven themselves.

The pope dies, you get another pope.

Presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.

Were there no contrariety of interests, nothing would be more simple and easy than to form and preserve free institutions. The right of suffrage alone would be a sufficient guarantee. It is the conflict of opposing interests which renders it the most difficult work of man.

Was the Soviet Union reformable? I would say no. They said, 'Okay, the Soviet Union isn't working.' They would say, 'No, it's great. We just need democracy, political pluralism, private property.' And then there was no Soviet Union. The European Union is the same.

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

While bringing about reforms and improving institutions, we have to be cautious that while shaking the tree to remove the bad fruit, we do not bring down the tree itself.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

A constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it. Its course cannot always he tranquil. It is exposed to storms and tempests, and its framers must be unwise statesmen indeed if they have not provided it, so far as its nature will permit, with the means of self preservation from the perils it may be destined to encounter.

The most difficult thing to build up is the rule of law. America already had it when their nation began.

A system that is built on checks and balances does not do well in an ideological climate.

The inducements of interest for observing [neutral] conduct . . . has been to endeavour to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption, to that degree of strength and consistency, which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.

In every society the permanent government is more change averse than the changing government.

The E.U. cannot act as guardian of the post-Cold War status quo without risking a collapse of Europe's current institutional infrastructure.

Democracy requires a strong civil service—government employees who are sufficiently protected from random political influences to carry out the law in a disinterested fashion.

My sense was that most of the elected officials in Washington - in their heart of hearts - really believe that the system can't be too bad because it produced them. And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power. We've seen it time after time after time.

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?

I hold that there is a mysterious connection between the fate of this country and that of Mexico; so much so that her independence and capability of sustaining herself are almost as essential to our prosperity and the maintenance of our institutions as they are to hers.

The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on any single personality.