A Worthy Quote

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage." --John Witherspoon, The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men. 1776

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Washington, 1792

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"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." --Benjamin Franklin, Reply to Coffee House Orators, 1767

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 1784

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"If virtue & knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great security." --Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, 1779

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; for the true idea of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.' That,as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics." --John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, 1816

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 31, 1788

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself." --Benjamin Franklin, 1789

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions." --James Madison, National Gazette Essay, 1792

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents." --James Madison, letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1788

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." --Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." --Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 1775

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated." --James Madison, Speech at the Virginia Convention, 1829

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily

"All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride legitimately, by the grace of God." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, 1826