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Founders' Quote Database

James Madison

Federalist No. 10 — 1787
Category: Human Nature
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.

James Madison

Federalist No. 51 — 1788
Category: Human Nature
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

James Madison

letter to Thomas Jefferson — 1798
Category: Immigration
The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents.

James Madison

letter to John Brown — 1788
Category: Judiciary
[R]efusing or not refusing to execute a law to stamp it with its final character...makes the Judiciary department paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was never intended and can never be proper.

James Madison

Federalist No. 51 — 1788
Category: Justice
Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

James Madison (likely)

Federalist No. 62 — 1788
Category: Bureaucracy
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow.

James Madison

Federalist No. 48 — 1788
Category: Congress
The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.

James Madison

Federalist No. 48 — 1788
Category: Congress
One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

James Madison

Federalist No. 55 — 1788
Category: Congress
Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

James Madison

Federalist No. 14 — 1787
Category: National Defense
America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.

James Madison

essay in the National Gazette — 1792
Category: National Defense
A universal peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts.

James Madison

Public Opinion — 1791
Category: Opinion
Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.

James Madison

letter to James Monroe — 1786
Category: Opinion
There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.... In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right....

James Madison

letter to Benjamin Rush — 1790
Category: Opinion
Nothing is so contagious as opinion, especially on questions which, being susceptible of very different glosses, beget in the mind a distrust of itself.

James Madison

letter to James Monroe — 1824
Category: Patriotism
The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it.

James Madison

Federalist No. 42 — 1788
Category: The People
But the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain.

James Madison

Federalist No. 57 — 1788
Category: Political Leaders
The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

James Madison

Virginia Resolutions — 1798
Category: The Press
The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon . . . has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.

James Madison

speech at the Constitutional Convention — 1787
Category: Power
All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

James Madison

letter to Thomas Jefferson — 1788
Category: Power
Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.

James Madison

Federalist No. 48 — 1788
Category: Power
It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it. After discriminating, therefore, in theory, the several classes of power, as they may in their nature be legislative, executive, or judiciary, the next and most difficult task is to provide some practical security for each, against the invasion of the others.

James Madison

Report on the Virginia Resolutions — 1798
Category: The Press
To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

James Madison

Federalist No. 45 — 1788
Category: Federalism
The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security.

James Madison

Essay on Property — 1792
Category: Property
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.

James Madison

Federalist No. 41 — 1788
Category: National Defense
How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation?

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“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.” —James Madison (1788)

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