Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was the deputy Chairman of the Democratic Union of the Pacific, and we started at 8 I think and I was called to the telephone and to be told there's a coup, the government has been overthrown - it was round about 9, 10 when the Parliament sat they had done then.
We got our revolution out of the way long before the French and the Americans. The monarchy was restored, but the sovereignty of our parliament, made up of and elected by a slowly widening constituency of the people, has never been seriously challenged since then.
I knew it to be very doubtful whether the Cabinet, Parliament, and the country would take this view on the outbreak of war, and through the whole of this week I had in view the probable contingency that we should not decide at the critical moment to support France.
Whether we make it a condition or just through persuasion or just through popular support, whatever it takes, we really do need to shift through a system of voting where the way the Canadian public votes is the way the Canadian Parliament is formed after the election.
I know this isn't a widespread view in the Anglo Saxon world, but I believe that much of the reconciliation between more centralized governance and the scope for democracy - democratic control - will be resolved through an even stronger role of the European Parliament.
Well, we know that eighteen years after that solemn declaration it was disregarded, and the Irish Parliament, which lasted for five hundred years, was destroyed by the Act of Union. Gentlemen, the Act of Union was carried by force and fraud, by treachery and falsehood.
The reality of the Green party is that we are a party committed to bringing forward big ideas, new ideas and demonstrating by our conduct in parliament and through the election that we really want to work for Canadians, work across party lines, work across jurisdictions.
It is important that the decorum and dignity of the House is upheld at all times. The image of Parliament in the public mind should be one where proceedings, debates and discussions take place with a view to resolve issues through a constructive and co-operative approach.
We have used the presence of UNMIK, as well as other European and American agencies to establish a legal framework compatible with the European Union and that is already an advantage. We have seen the positive effects of this and our parliament will continue to go this way.
Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, thirteen per cent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top - C-level jobs, board seats - tops out at fifteen, sixteen per cent.
It is our job, as members of parliament, to legislate with an eye to the long term future, to look over the horizon beyond the next election and ensure that as far as we can what we do today will make Australia a better place, a safer place, for future generations to live in.
We are a constitutional monarchy. I don't order laws, I propose them. Article 35 of our constitution states that the king can only refuse a law of parliament once, then he has to sign it - if the same law is then supported by a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.
I've always been really uninterested in politicians and the acts of the Houses of Parliament, or government as an idea. But I'm interested in politics in that I'm a member of the world, and I have strong feelings of right and wrong, but I can't get into the ins and outs of it.
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.
For many years I have talked about building a Hire a Veteran culture in Canada in order that both public and private sector employers understand and value military training and experience in their hiring programs. For me, this work began long before I became a Member of Parliament.
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.
Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.
I shall not miss the hectoring and backbiting and the lack of generosity towards fallen foes, but I will miss the sheer clubability of parliament. If one fancies a coffee or a meal or a drink then it is always possible to find at least one person out of 646 whose company is congenial.
When I was a little bitty kid, I was listening to the stuff my parents were listening to. My mom was a huge Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige fan. My dad had a cover band that I sang with, and he loved Parliament, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, the blues, James Brown.
I'm not going to tell the Palestinians how to arrange themselves. If they want to have their own entity and their own parliament as they do today, that's fine. If they want to connect to Jordan, which has a very big Palestinian population, and vote in the Jordanian government, that's fine.
The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.
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.
I tend to discourage people from calling me 'Sir Ian,' because I don't like being separated out from the rest of the population. Of course, it can be useful if you're writing an official letter, like trying to get a visa or something passed through Parliament. They're impressed by these things.
In Parliament, you need to ensure that there is a diverse and well-rounded group of individuals who are coming together to speak on behalf of national interests. I want to represent the voices of young Singaporeans who feel that they want a stake in this country, who want to have their voice heard.
For many years I have advocated 'redesigning Parliament' in a variety of ways - elect the Senate, do away with the 'confidence convention,' permit freer voting, strengthen the role of back benchers and committees, do away with ineffectual 'take note' debates, restructure question period, and so on.
I got an invitation to speak in the European parliament and I met Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the U.N. I took those opportunities to talk about what I thought was right. That those people, who are more important and powerful than I am, think I'm relevant enough to give a speech is mind-blowing.
Politics is terrifying, very masculine, and not particularly encouraging to young blonde women - as a career, that is - and it was only when I was working in parliament that I thought to myself, 'Well, this is a tough industry; can an acting career be any more intimidating?' and I applied to drama school.
I was shocked when I heard that Farghadani had been sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison on spurious charges, as Amnesty International notes, of 'spreading propaganda against the system,' 'insulting members of the parliament through paintings' and 'insulting the Supreme Leader' with her cartoon.
Italy is a tough country to be a comedian in - I can't invent stuff like this. Nearly eighty crooks in Parliament - that's about one crook in twelve. It's worse than Scampia, the most dangerous Naples slum, which is infested by the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. There, the criminals are only one in fifteen!
When I was selected as a Labour council candidate in 2009, people publicly challenged how I could possibly represent anyone from the Bengali community because of my faith and since my selection and election as the member of parliament for Liverpool, Wavertree, I have received a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse.
The House of Commons has the undoubted rights to expel members for misconduct. This is an absolute authority which cannot be challenged in any court, as it derives from the twin concept of the High Court of Parliament being the most senior court in the land and of each House's right to regulate its own affairs.
As someone who has put my life on hold, my personal life on hold, for Parliament and for public service for over a decade and a half, I really got to a culmination point where I had to make a decision to have more normality in my life, or sacrifice that entirely for a campaign that was going to be all consuming.
Is there some reason why the quality of people going into the parliament is not as high? I don't know the complete answer, but I think - in fact, I'm sure - that part of it is the increasing intrusiveness of the media - the general media and social media - into the private lives of politicians and their families.
Europe has shown how government can be organised in a network. Its institutions both compete and co-operate and include a directly elected parliament that does not appoint the executive, independent judiciaries and a complex set of relationships between the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament.
My great-great-aunt was a terrorist. I'm not talking about the sense in which the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi was branded a terrorist by the British parliament in 1932: Pritilata Waddedar was an active participant in armed struggle against the British state. She supplied explosives. She fired a gun. And I'm proud of it.
When I was asked to manage some issues in Europe for the government, I didn't go to Parliament and just make a great speech and impress them. Instead, I will go down and discuss with those people about certain issues that we don't agree, and over a glass of wine we talk about it and they say 'okay, let's forget it.'
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.
As nations we should also commit afresh to righting past wrongs. In Australia we began this recently with the first Australians - the oldest continuing culture in human history. On behalf of the Australian Parliament, this year I offered an apology to indigenous Australians for the wrongs they had suffered in the past.
I grew up in a mixed-race family in Bristol. My cousin was this white guy who was interested in Parliament, Marc Bolan, Bowie. His friends were football thugs and while I was getting ready for bed, they'd be listening to all that music. When I was older, I'd go to a Jamaican sound system and there were no white people.
From Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela to Equatorial Guinea and the Ivory Coast, China dangles lavish, low-interest loans and sophisticated weapons systems as bait. It then uses its 'weapons of mass construction,' a huge army of engineers and labourers, to build everything from roads and dams to parliament buildings and palaces.
Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.
There should be some other provisions in the Constitution whereby if the Government is not functioning well, it can be dealt with. In a parliamentary democracy, this should be done only by Parliament. The prime minister should be answerable only to Parliament and it should only be Parliament that can install him or remove him.
A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions, from academia to Parliament to the law.
The world's moving; people move around the world. A lot of people coming to this country have terrific talent to bring to the country - not just in business and in the professions but in Parliament as well. And we need some failsafe system so that, right at the outset, they are aware that they have to drop any other citizenship.
When I took over as president, I studied the Constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realised that it does not prevent the president of India from giving the nation a vision. So when I went and presented this vision in Parliament and in legislative assemblies; everyone welcomed it, irrespective of party affiliations.
I was elected by people voting Labour! The idea that you come to Parliament and the first thing you do is that you're hand in hand with Tories and Liberals - I can't understand it! I came here and I made my mind up that I wasn't going to collaborate with the people I'd fought against in the election. It wasn't a difficult thing.
You always draw from your roots. I'm influenced by everything I hear and see, and that includes music today, but obviously I go back to my early influences: Stevie Wonder, Parliament, Earth, Wind & Fire, Ohio Players, Average White Band. Those kind of artists are what I look to. When I hear that stuff on the radio, I turn it up!
When I go in and talk to students about being a Member of Parliament, I say to them it took me 21 years from joining the Conservative Party as a 16-year-old to being elected as a Member of Parliament for the first time in Loughborough. It's a long journey, but the rewards when you get there, the feeling of accomplishment is huge.
The Treaty of Lisbon gave the European parliament a stronger role as co-legislator and the European Council its own president. Furthermore, the treaty introduced checks on subsidiarity - the concept that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the citizens - in an effort to cut back on unnecessary rules and regulations.
On NAFTA, the Canadian Parliament... is united. We have our partisan differences. When we hold the government to account, as is our role in our parliamentary system, we will absolutely point out what we think they should be doing differently. But when it comes to our relationship with the United States, we do speak with one voice.