Founders’ Quotes

If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws — the first growing out of the last. ... A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.

Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected.

If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.

The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents.

The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.

To the haranguers of the populace among the ancients, succeed among the moderns your writers of political pamphlets and news-papers, and your coffee-house talkers.

National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman.

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

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

The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people.

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

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.