Representative Assembly Quotes

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.

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.

Perhaps no General Council has been more naturally fitted than the Vatican Council to produce a masterpiece of religious thought and literature. No assembly of men since the time of Christ has ever been so representative of Christian and national thought.

Don't you dare besmirch the name of Congress. They are patriotic Americans trying to dress and feed themselves.

The greater or less importance of a representative assembly is like the quicksilver in a barometer; it rises or falls according to causes external to itself; and is but an index exhibited in a palpable form, of the more or less powerful pressure of the popular atmosphere.

A representative assembly, although extremely well qualified, and absolutely necessary, as a branch of the legislative, is unfit to exercise the executive power, for want of two essential properties, secrecy and dispatch.

Great Council

Would it not be easier...for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?

When the Communist Party has made up its mind on any subject, it is so certain of being able to carry its point that the calling together of the All-Russian Executive Committee is merely a theatrical demonstration of the fact that it can do what it likes. When it does meet, the Communists allow the microscopical opposition great liberty of speech, listen quietly, cheer ironically, and vote like one man, proving on every occasion that the meeting of the Executive Committee was the idlest of forms, intended rather to satisfy purists than for purposes of discussion, since the real discussion has all taken place beforehand among the Communists themselves. Something like this must happen with every representative assembly at which a single party has a great preponderance and a rigid internal discipline