A Quote by Alejandro Castro Espin

Can we say that the constitutional monarchies in Spain, Belgium or England are democratic? Those with superior chambers like the House of Lords in England, that still represent the English feudal nobility in terms of positions above regional representatives, who are in the end the representatives supposedly elected by the population. Many mechanisms exist, but they are mechanisms to preserve the power of the wealthy classes, of the bourgeois classes that hold the power and rights above the rest of the society.

Alejandro Castro Espin

Quote Topics

Above Belgium Bourgeois Chambers Classes Constitutional Democratic Elected End England English Exist Feudal Hold House House Of Lords In The End Like Lords Many Mechanisms Nobility Population Positions Power Preserve Regional Represent Representatives Rest Rights Say Society Spain Still Superior Supposedly Terms Those Wealthy

Quote Author

Alejandro Castro Espin
Born: July 29, 1965

In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times.

Robert Waterman McChesney

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.

George Bernard Shaw

For loving, working, and creative people to throw off the yoke of power it is necessary to abolish power itself, not merely to make the yoke comfortable. Where some have power, others do not, and the two classes persist. A free society is where all have power-power over and responsibility for their own lives, power and reason to respect the lives of others. This is also a society without classes, a society of human beings, not rulers and the ruled.

Karl Hess

France placed the state above society , democracy above constitutionalism, and equality above liberty. As a result, for much of the nineteenth century it was democratic, with broad suffrage and elections, but hardly liberal. it was certainly a less secure home for individual freedom than was England or America.

Fareed Zakaria

Christians, above all people, should desire that their elected representatives submit to the Constitution, because it is constitutional government that has done more to protect Christian liberty than any governing document ever devised by man.

Chuck Baldwin

The House of Lords has many fine aspects, but at its heart, it is a betrayal of the core democratic principle that those in the enlightened world hold so dear - that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those who must obey those laws.

Charles Kennedy

If it be asked what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer, the genius of the whole system, the nature of just and constitutional laws, and above all the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.

James Madison

The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.

Noam Chomsky

It is true that power corrupts. The hope at the polling stations and the actions of the elected representatives, unfortunately, often turn to be opposite. The power of ballot turns into the power of wallet. Some law-makers become law-breakers.

Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj

[James] Madison pointed out in the discussion of the constitutional debates - the constitutional convention - that democracy would be a danger. He used England of course as the model and said suppose that in England everyone had the free right to vote; the poor, the propertyless - who are the great majority - would use their voting power to take away the rights of property owners to carry out what we would call land reform.

Noam Chomsky

The real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties-that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have.

William Graham Sumner

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

Barbara Kruger

The historian assesses that the investment of the wealthy classes in the Bank of England wedded them to the fate of the nation as a whole and to the maintenance of its stability.

Walter Russell Mead

The career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one's hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions.

Max Weber

The government's desire to expand global trade may be understandable, but we mustn't give away too much. We must tell our elected representatives to at least delay the Canada-China FIPA until it has been examined more thoroughly, and to reconsider the inclusion of investor-state arbitration mechanisms in all trade deals.