Founders’ Quotes

If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.

In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature.

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.

It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.

The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people.

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.

Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families.

This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

Every prudent and cautious judge ... will remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law, but to interpret and apply it.

The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day.

Constitutions of civil government are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried course of human affairs.

The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded.

All know and feel ... the sacredness of the connection between husband and wife. All know that the sweetness of social intercourse, the harmony of society, the happiness of families, depend on that mutual partiality which they feel, or that delicate forbearance which they manifest towards each other.

We must take human nature as we find it, perfection falls not to the share of mortals.

[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes — rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments.

In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.