A Worthy Quote

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"How much more do they deserve our reverence and praise, whose lives are devoted to the formation of institutions, which, when they and their children are mingled in the common dust, may continue to cherish the principles and the practice of liberty in perpetual freshness and vigor." --Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it." --John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind." --Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 5, 1778

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Maria Cosway, 1786

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"Wisely, therefore, do they consider union and a good national government as necessary to put and keep them in such a situation as, instead of inviting war, will tend to repress and discourage it. That situation consists in the best possible state of defense, and necessarily depends on the government, the arms, and the resources of the country." --John Jay, Federalist No. 4

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government." --James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"It is the reason alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government." --James Madison, Federalist No. 49, 1788

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." --James Madison, speech in the Virginia constitutional convention, 1829

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability." --Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Federalist No. 62, 1788

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"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." --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, 1781

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"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." --Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"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." --John Adams, letter to the young men of the Philadelphia, 1798

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"History will also give Occasion to expatiate on the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government; their Industry encouraged and rewarded, Arts invented, and Life made more comfortable: The Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from good Laws and a due Execution of Justice. Thus may the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix'd in the Minds of Youth." --Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, 1749

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy. ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened." --Benjamin Franklin, Emblematical Representations

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"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