A Worthy Quote

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"Can you then consent to be the only sufferers by this revolution, and retiring from the field, grow old in poverty, wretchedness and contempt? Can you consent to wade through the vile mire of dependency, and owe the miserable remnant of that life to charity, which has hitherto been spent in honor? If you can -- GO -- and carry with you the jest of tories and scorn of whigs -- the ridicule, and what is worse, the pity of the world. Go, starve, and be forgotten!" --George Washington, letter to the Officers of the Army, 1783

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"Why give through agents whom we know not, to persons whom we know not, and in countries from which we get no account, where we can do it at short hand, to objects under our eye, through agents we know, and to supply wants we see?" --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Michael Megear, 1823

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency." --George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"It is an unquestionable truth, that the body of the people in every country desire sincerely its prosperity. But it is equally unquestionable that they do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government. To deny that they are frequently led into the grossest of errors, by misinformation and passion, would be a flattery which their own good sense must despise." --Alexander Hamilton, speech to the Ratifying Convention of New York, 1788

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." --Declaration of Independence

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"The pyramid of government-and a republican government may well receive that beautiful and solid form-should be raised to a dignified altitude: but its foundations must, of consequence, be broad, and strong, and deep. The authority, the interests, and the affections of the people at large are the only foundation, on which a superstructure proposed to be at once durable and magnificent, can be rationally erected." --James Wilson, Legislative Department, 1804

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper's ally, It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it." --Fisher Ames, Review of the Pamphlet on the State of the British Constitution, 1807

[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
"Newspapers ... serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1802

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men." --Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren November 4, 1775

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution." --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia Query 19, 1781

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"The people can never wilfully betray their own interests; but they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people; and the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act." --Federalist No. 63

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"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; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1

[nChrist]

Founder's Quote Daily
"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush, 1800