James Madison
The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.
Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
In no instance have... the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.
If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.
I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.
There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?
War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.
If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within.Collection: Taken
Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.Collection: Strength
The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded.Collection: Law
Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.Collection: Rallying Cry
The purpose of the Constitution is to restrict the majority's ability to harm a minority.Collection: Majority
Disarm the people- that is the best and most effective way to enslave them.Collection: Gun
We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.Collection: Bible
The ultimate authority resides in the people, and that if the federal government got too powerful and overstepped its authority, then the people would develop plans of resistance and resort to arms.Collection: Powerful
Democracy is the most vile form of government.Collection: Government
If man is not fit to govern himself, how can he be fit to govern someone else?Collection: Men
The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state shall not be questioned.Collection: Bears
We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nations to the changed conditions.Collection: Wisdom
Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.Collection: Army
People will continue to seek justice until it is found, or until liberty is lost in the pursuit.Collection: People
Resistance to tyranny is service to God.Collection: Liberty
A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.Collection: President
Conscience is the most sacred of all property.Collection: Religious
Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.Collection: Government
There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by...corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.Collection: Evil
If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is that every man has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one. This principle is not only recorded in every public archive, written in every American heart, and sealed with the blood of American martyrs, but is the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold their existence as a nation.Collection: Heart
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest... The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man.Collection: Passion
Is there a Legislative power in fact, not expressly prohibited by the Constitution, which might not, according to the doctrine of the Court, be exercised as a means of carrying into effect some specified Power?Collection: Mean
[A]s it must be admitted that the remedy under the Constitution lies where it has been marked out by the Constitution; and that no appeal can be consistently made from that remedy by those who were and still profess to be parties to it, but the appeal to the parties themselves having an authority above the Constitution or to the law of nature & of nature's God.Collection: Lying
Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness.Collection: Rights
Where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure.Collection: Party
To consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle.Collection: Miracle
Of all the objections which have been framed against the federal Constitution, this is perhaps the most extraordinary. Whilst the objection itself is levelled against a pretended oligarchy, the principle of it strikes at the very root of republican government.Collection: Government
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.Collection: Men
[It] is indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the Community agst [against] the incapicity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate.Collection: Community
Religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, that all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate, unless under color of religion any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or safety of society, and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity toward each other.Collection: Christian
The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting Usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity.Collection: Christian
The political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion.Collection: Passion
Are not the daily devotions conducted by these legal ecclesiastics already degenerating into a scanty attendance, and a tiresome formality?Collection: Atheism
The general government is proscribed from the interfering, in any manner whatsoever, in matters respecting religion; and it may be thought to do this, in ascertaining who, and who are not, ministers of the gospel.Collection: Government
[T]he bill exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions, and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.... This particular church, therefore, would so far be a religious establishment by law, a legal force and sanction being given to certain articles in its constitution and administration.Collection: Religious
How a regulation so unjust in itself, so foreign to the authority of Congress, and so hurtful to the sale of public land, and smelling so strongly of an antiquated bigotry, could have received the countenance of a committee is truly a matter of astonishment.Collection: Land