A Quote by Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel
The house of Lords must be the only institution in the world which is kept efficient by the persistent absenteeism of most of its members.
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I do strongly believe myself that members of the government who sit in the House of Lords should be accountable to the elected House because otherwise there is a democratic deficit, and that is wrong.
News flash: The federal government is not the most efficient institution in the world. Taxpayers know that.
It is quite clear from what has been said and written that, time after time after time, there has been a conspiracy between the Conservative Front Bench in this House and the inbuilt Conservative majority in the House of Lords to defeat legislation that has passed through the House of Commons... I warn the House of Lords of the consequences... it is our strong view that the House of Lords should recall that its role is not that of a wrecking chamber, but of a revising chamber. In recent weeks, it has been wrecking legislation passed by this House.
We must restore faith in politics. Reform of the House of Lords is only one part of the answer, but it is a vital one.
But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.
I've always said that I favour an elected second chamber and I think it's important that there are members of the House of Lords who are willing to vote for their own demise.
I have a huge admiration for the House of Lords, I have a huge admiration for the people who work in the House of Lords, they're great public servants and they do an absolutely tremendous job.
It is a fundamental principle that every institution must be accountable to an authority which is independent of that institution. Yet somehow, the judiciary has propagated a view that the judiciary can only be accountable to itself.
It is therefore our business to restore economic freedom through the restoration of the only institution under which it flourishes, which institution is Property. The problem before us is, how to restore Property so that it shall be, as it was not so long ago, a general institution.
One out of four hundred and thirty-five members of the House is not going to transform the culture of the institution, but we've got to start somewhere.
I stood on the street, staring up at the most normal-looking house in the world. My house. I'd lived there my entire life. It was home. It was safe. It was haunted. The only other explanation was that I was demented. I couldn't say which I was rooting for.
Jesus was the poorest of the poor. Roman Catholicism, which claims to be His church, is the richest of the rich, the wealthiest institution on earth. () How come, that such an institution, ruling in the name of this same itinerant preacher, whose want was such that he had not even a pillow upon which to rest his head, is now so top-heavy with riches that she can rival - indeed, that she can put to shame - the combined might of the most redoubtable financial trusts, of the most potent industrial super-giants, and of the most prosperous global corporation of the world?
Speaker Boehner has said many times that the House of Representatives is the closest institution to the people, and he recognizes that by empowering the members to have direct input into the process.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
We see the tendency in the world to criticise democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about.
Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.
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