undemocratic governance Quotes

A government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

The dominance of the conservatives during forty years created a unique political situation. It meant the preponderance of the executive branch of government over the legislative and tended to centralize power in the hands of a few. These few people in the seat of power began to be closely linked up with the equally small number of people controlling the business enterprises of the country. While, therefore, Japan as a nation was making a steady advance on the Asiatic mainland and in the world at large, the political conscience of the people itself was not given a needed chance to express itself. It gradually created an atmosphere of lamentable indifference to politics on the part of the majority of the people. They were not given suffrage to express themselves and even those few who had votes realized that the exercise of their power did not mean much in formulating the country's policy.

I made a mistake by being ejected from the presidency. Next time, I will choose a Cabinet which will allow me to be life President.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

I order you to hold a free election but forbid you to elect any but Richard [d'Ilchester.]

The senate was wealthy people and it wasn't elected, it was chosen through legislatures, which themselves were under private influence, powerful influence. They were remote from the population and that's where power was suppose to reside.

I think that too far, too much, to a greater degree than is anywhere near appropriate, America and our politics are being governed by more and more powerful interests, by fewer and fewer people in the sense of the amount of money that has controlled access and other kinds of things.

I noticed long ago that Amin has the tendency to concentrate power in his own hands but I did not attach any particular significance to this. However, recently this tendency has become dangerous.

The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Only weeks after Oslo began, when nearly all the world and most of Israel was drunk with the idea of peace, I argued that a Palestinian society not constrained by democratic norms would be a fear society that would pose a grave threat to Israel.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Military or dictatorial rule is not good for our Pakistan.

The concentrating of powers in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

You don't help a country by supporting a military regime that denies any sign of democracy, and what defeated Pakistan was its military regime.

The European Union has become a prison of peoples. Each of the 28 countries that constitute it has slowly lost its democratic prerogatives to commissions and councils with no popular mandate. Every nation in the union has had to apply laws it did not want for itself.

When we talk about authoritarianism, we conjure up out-of-date visions from the 1930s. But we are no more likely to do authoritarian government the way they did in the 1930s then we're likely to address or talk or do any of our other business in the way they did it in the 1930s.

More and more people in my country recognise the dangers of having their governors appointed by Putin and having no influence in parliament because Parliament today is also following instructions from Kremlin and no longer represents its people.

We have reached a stage where governments and political processes have been hijacked by the corporate world. Corporations can within five hours influence the vote in the U.S. Congress. They can influence the entire voting patterns of the Indian Parliament. Ordinary people who put governments in power might want to go in a different direction. I call this the phenomenon of the inverted state, where the state is no longer accountable to the people. The state only serves the interests of corporations.

We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes - and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench.