Founders’ Quotes

The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them.

During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.

Equal laws protecting equal rights; the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country.

We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort.

The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares.

The Constitution ... is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

Newspapers ... serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.

History by apprising [citizens] of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake.

The natural cure for an ill-administration, in a popular or representative constitution, is a change of men.

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world. Justly understood it is sacred next to those which we appropriate in divine adoration; but in the mouths of some it means anything, which enervate a necessary government; excite a jealousy of the rulers who are our own choice, and keep society in confusion for want of a power sufficiently concentered to promote good.

Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason.

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.

If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.

We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.