Power Accountability Quotes

All political power is a trust.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

When you establish a powerful position, the first think you have to do is check that power and make it accountable.

Each age must … contend anew with the question of power and accountability.

The ability of the press to print their stories without the government trying to get them to betray their sources is as essential to a free press as the ink it is printed with. Otherwise, who will hold accountable those who hold power over us?

Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

We could try and establish a world in which the great and the powerful adhere to that international law which they require ordinary mortals to adhere to. In other words, there is one international law, and even America and even Russia and China and Japan must adhere to it, and Australia must adhere to it.

I repeat... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

It is a universal and fundamental political principle that the power to protect can safely be confided only to those interested in protecting, or their responsible agents - a maxim not less true in private than in public affairs.

I think we should all be proud that we are living in a country where we can question those we put in power because, at the end of the day, they work for every citizen.

Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters.

I do not care how brave a president is; I do not care how many medals he may wear. I do not care how well trained his guards may be. If he violates the will of the people, he shall be eliminated.

The point of journalism is to hold people in positions of power accountable.

Our duty as journalists is to use our clarity - and our imagination - to build hope in the societies in which we work. Our duty is to keep holding power to account, and to fight for press freedom around the world.

We need journalists to be fearless and hold power to account.

We owe the government taxes. We owe our creditors interest. What do these powers owe us?

Whenever there's a camera around, a video or film camera, it's a great deal harder for those in power to bury the story.

In a democratic nation, power must be linked with responsibility, and obliged to defend and justify itself within the framework of the general good.

No other depositories of power [but the people themselves] have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge.