A Quote by John Stuart Mill

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.

John Stuart Mill

Quote Topics

Assembly Control Function Governing Government Instead Office Proper Radically Representative Unfit Watch Which

Quote Author

John Stuart Mill
English - Philosopher
May 20, 1806 - May 8, 1873

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.

John Adams

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.

Theodore Roosevelt

The government being the peoples business, it necessarily follows that its operations should be at all times open to the public view. Publicity is therefore as essential to honest administration as freedom of speech is to representative government. Equal rights to all and special privileges to none is the maxim which should control in all departments of government.

William Jennings Bryan

Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand.

Ron Paul

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.

James F. Cooper

A government, the constitution of which renders it unfit to be trusted with all the powers which a free people ought to delegate to any government, would be an unsafe and improper depositary of the NATIONAL INTERESTS.

Alexander Hamilton

The fact that a former senator and secretary of state claimed not to know what the letter "C" means is just one more example why she is totally unfit to hold the office of president. Totally unfit.

Donald Trump

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.

Lionel Trilling

The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth.

Theodore Roosevelt

The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good, and difficult for them to do evil.

Daniel Webster

I am not the representative of guerrilla in this hemisphere. I would say that the representative would be Fidel Castro which was the leader of our revolution and who had the most outstanding role in the direction of the revolutionary struggle and directs the strategy of the Cuban government.

Che Guevara

Hillary [Clinton] had started running a million-dollar ad campaign trying to define [Donald] Trump as temperamentally unfit for the office and intellectually unfit. No experience. It's dangerous to let Trump anywhere near the nuclear codes and the push button and so forth.

Rush Limbaugh

That is, we believed, the supreme duty of the parent, who only was permitted to claim in some degree the priestly office and function, since it is his creative and protecting power which alone approaches the solemn function of Deity.

Charles Eastman

The functions of these elders, therefore, determine the power of the people; for a representative is one chosen by others to do in their name what they are entitled to do in their own persons; or rather to exercise the powers which radically inhere in those for whom they act.

Charles Hodge

How lovely." The old lady sighed. "An office romance. I always wanted an office romance. Of course I never really had a job, which made the situation more challenging. Oh, I worked on an assembly line during World War II, but there weren't very many men around and as my husband was off serving his country, an office romance would have been unpatriotic, don't you think?--Mrs. Ford