Quotes About Parliament

Uma "ditadura" não precisa envolver um ditador efetivo. Tudo o que era necessário, dizia Bastiat, eram "as leis", promulgadas por um Congresso ou um Parlamento, que produzissem o mesmo efeito: conformidade forçada.

Lord Fellmotte was not a man. He was an ancient committee. A parliament of deathly rooks in a dying tree.

When the Labour benches cheered, the Tories were still plotting to get rid of him.

When the Canadian confederation took place in 1867, a lot of people in Quebec said, 'Could we have a referendum?' They said, 'Oh, no. In the British tradition, the Parliament can do anything, excluding changing a man into a woman, and, therefore, no referendum' - and that was that.

I think the state opening of Parliament is an incredibly important occasion, and broadly speaking, the way in which it's done is an invaluable tradition.

It is the right of a democratically elected parliament to act in defence of our traditional liberties, and everything should be done to keep it that way.

I make no pretence at being well-versed in politics - it is all too often about personalities and emotion - but I do know a thing or two about our constitution, as I once trained to be a lawyer. Even a first-year law student learns that an overriding principle is that parliament is sovereign.

Parliamentary sovereignty - the right to pass laws as the supreme legal authority in the land, including laws that limit the powers of the executive - has been hard-won over hundreds of years. We trample on it at our peril.

Transparency will be at the heart of everything I do - it's what parliament expects, and it's what the public deserves.

The honest truth is that if this government were to propose the massacre of the first-born, it would still have no difficulty in getting it through the Commons.

The design is based on the old St. Stephen's Chapel, where the earliest parliamentarians sat, like choirboys in facing pews, yet there is little that is angelic in the modern set-up. Members face each other in confrontation, as antagonists. They are separated by two red lines on the carpet, whose distance apart represents the distance of two sword lengths, yet this is misleading, for the most imminent danger is never more than a dagger's distance away, on the benches behind.

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

Parliament's job is to conduct discussions. But many a time, Parliament is used to ignore issues, and in such situations, obstruction of Parliament is in the favour of democracy. Therefore, parliamentary obstruction is not undemocratic.

I'm going to reduce the size of the Cabinet, cut the number of ministers, reduce the size of the House of Commons, campaign for a European Parliament with 100 fewer members, halve the number of political advisers, and abolish a huge swathe of Labour's regional bureaucracies and agencies and their offices in Brussels.

The most celebrated pocket borough was Dunwich, a coastal town in Suffolk that had once been a great port—the third biggest in England—but was washed into the sea during a storm in 1286. Despite its conspicuous nonexistence, it was represented in Parliament until 1832 by a succession of privileged nonentities.

Uncle Auberon (who was quite an old gentleman) had stopt listening to them both a while ago and had wandered off to resume his search for a book. It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it (though he had had it in his hand not a hundred years before). So Mr Goodfellow said nothing but quietly turned himself back into William Shakespeare.

It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it

I am rather of the opinion that in England a gentleman's dreams are his own private concern. I fancy there is a law in that effect and, if there is not, why, Parliament should certainly be made to pass one immediately! It ill becomes another man to invite himself into them.

When question time in the House was over, Forster picked up his red box of papers and left his front bench seat by Gladstone's side for the last time.

She could remember running along the same stretch of the Embankment before, with the Doctor, soon after they first met. It was strange how similar and yet how different it al seemed. The skyline was lower, yet most of the landmarks were there – the Houses of Parliament, the bridges. No Millennium Wheel, though, she thought with a smile.

When I was an MP, John Prescott barracked me in the House of Commons, shouting: 'Woolly jumper! Woolly jumper!'

the judiciary, and particularly to the change in legal thought and in the position of the judge that culminated in the new principle of judicial review of statutes (as a means of sabotaging social reforms). The power of the judges thereby grew at the expense of the parliament.*

I was a Member of the European Parliament for a period of time and I saw a lot of European laws and treaties.

We should honour the memory of past members like Airey Neave by treating each other and the institution of parliament itself with more respect. Nobody should denigrate it for doing exactly what it should be doing - debating and arguing the most difficult and complex decisions of our time.