Political Legitimacy Quotes

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

When John Kerry and Zell Miller and George Bush can agree on an issue, you know it's got legs.

Where there is no common power, there is no law

Any person should have enough sense to know that a PM should have public support. Numbers should be with them.

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms.

Government legitimacy depends on a public perception of fairness.

The Arab monarchies, especially Jordan and Morocco, are more legitimate than the false republics, with their stolen elections, regime-dominated courts and rubber-stamp parliaments.

A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.

I never believed that surrendering the executive power should be a condition of getting the second term. The second term should stand on its own feet.

The state is the legal embodiment of the nation. Political institutions are efficient to the extent to which they express and safeguard national interests.

All governments must maintain power by consent. Not by coercion.

Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.

Government without a constitution, is a power without a right.

As the happiness of the people is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it ...

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

No government, no head of government can last if the people feel that this government is not going to defend the security of the country.

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.

Washington is politics! Somehow if people have political objectives, then those objectives are automatically disqualified? If that's the case, the Democrats have no business being legitimized about anything because everything they do is political.

What holds an Arab leader in power is a mixture of violence and prestige. Both President Assad and King Hussein were felt to have defended Arab interests against the world. That, in the end, is more important than what they wear on their head.

Putin doesn't conduct elections in the Western sense of elections. This is more accurately probably described as a plebiscite, where people are supposed to express their support for him. The Russian system is not unique in this respect, but it is rather interesting. Here, in the West, the impression that people have is that Putin runs the whole country. This is not so, at all. To a certain extent, you could say that he runs the Kremlin, and this means that it's, in some situations, hard to tell whether it's him running the Kremlin, or the people around him running him.

The first duty of our Government to its own citizens and foreigners within its borders is the preservation of order. Unless and until that duty is met a government is not even eligible for recognition among the family of nations.

I thought it was a joke at first, but the president did, in fact, authorize an autopen to sign the Patriot Act extension into law. Consider the dangerous precedent this sets. Any number of circumstances could arise in the future where the public could question whether or not the president authorized the use of an autopen.

Governments and citizens blend together only in the imaginations of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens. There is no magic in a ballot box that makes government any less coercive.

Citizens are refined, cultivated, and very political. I believe in the legitimacy of their participation.