Founders’ Quotes

Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.

Where there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community.

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.

A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired.

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

Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.

Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.

The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all citizens.

We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times.

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.

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

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual — or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.

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.

The great principles of right and wrong are legible to every reader; to pursue them requires not the aid of many counselors. The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

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

I think all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty.

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.