Founder's Quote Database | The Patriot Post

Founders' Quote Database

Keywords

Author

James Monroe

speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention — 1788
Category: Government

How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism.

John Adams

draft of a Newspaper Communication — 1770
Category: Government

Human government is more or less perfect as it approaches nearer or diverges farther from the imitation of this perfect plan of divine and moral government.

George Washington

letter to John Augustine Washington — 1776
Category: Government

To form a new Government, requires infinite care, and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad.

James Madison

Federalist No. 10 — 1787
Category: Democracy

[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Fisher Ames

speech in the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention — 1788
Category: Democracy

The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.

Alexander Hamilton

Federalist No. 78 — 1788
Category: Judiciary

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.

Thomas Jefferson

Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14 — 1781
Category: History

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.

Noah Webster

On the Education of Youth in America — 1788
Category: History

Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country.

James Madison

Records of the Convention — 1787
Category: Slavery

[The Convention] thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.

John Adams

letter to the young men of the Philadelphia — 1798
Category: History

Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that, after the most industrious and impartial researchers, the longest liver of you all will find no principles, institutions or systems of education more fit in general to be transmitted to your posterity than those you have received from your ancestors.

James Madison

Federalist No. 57 — 1788
Category: House of Representatives

If it be asked what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer, the genius of the whole system, the nature of just and constitutional laws, and above all the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.

James Madison

Federalist No. 57 — 1788
Category: House of Representatives

The house of representatives...can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interest, and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny.

Alexander Hamilton

Federalist No. 34 — 1788
Category: Human Nature

To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.

Benjamin Franklin

Autobiography — 1771
Category: Human Nature

In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will now and then peek out and show itself.

Alexander Hamilton

The Farmer Refuted — 1775
Category: Human Nature

There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.

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?

John Adams

the Novanglus — 1775
Category: Human Nature

Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?

George Washington

The Newburgh Address — 1783
Category: Human Nature

And you will, by the dignity of your Conduct, afford occasion for Posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to Mankind, had this day been wanting, the World had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.

George Washington

letter to John Jay — 1786
Category: Human Nature

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

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Hugh White — 1801
Category: Immigration

Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules. That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit, will certainly be the aim of our legislatures, general and particular.

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.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Charles Hammond — 1821
Category: Judiciary

It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression...that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one.

Alexander Hamilton

Federalist No. 78 — 1788
Category: Judiciary

The Judiciary...has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will.

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.

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