Founding Fathers Quotes

The Bible and its teachings helped form the basis for the Founding Fathers' abiding belief in the inalienable rights of the individual, rights which they found implicit in the Bible's teachings of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual. This same sense of man patterned the convictions of those who framed the English system of law inherited by our own Nation, as well as the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. ~ Ronald Reagan

The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They
always did ... they always will. They will have the same effect here as
elsewhere, if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper
spheres. ~ Gouverneur Morris

If we fulfill our responsibility to the Constitution, the Supreme Court will be filled with superior legal minds who will pursue the one agenda that our founding fathers intended in writing the Constitution: justice, rather than political or personal goals. ~ Chuck Grassley

They are our brothers, these freedom fighters ... They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong. ~ Ronald Reagan

The yearning for the common good comes from the refusal to accept that perhaps Americans have very little in common apart from the elements of a sometimes successful civil religion based around a sentimental, indeed sometimes teary-eyed, attachment to the constitution and a belief in the quasi-divine wisdom of the founding fathers. ~ Simon Critchley

He, who fails to acknowledge and appreciate the real courage of our fathers, fails to appreciate the real lessons that the courage of our fathers teaches us today! The courage and the wisdom that propelled our fathers to move unrelentingly in their days must be nothing to us, but, a real reason for us to be more than courageous enough to do the undone distinctively in our days. ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter ... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us ... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops. ~ Rachel Maddow

Our Founding Fathers drafted the Bill of Rights to ensure that We the People could determine how best to protect our communities. ~ Mike Quigley

I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses. ~ Marc Andreessen

Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents. ~ Thomas Jefferson

It was because 'in 1776 our fathers retired the gods from politics.' The basic principle of the American Republic is the freedom of man in society.
The Declaration of Independence was the product of Intellectual Emancipation, and that is why, from thenceforth, our date of existence should be recorded, not from the mythical birth of Jesus Christ, but from the day of our Independence! This should be the year one hundred and seventy-eight in our calendar!
Despite discouraging signs here and there, the seeds of freedom planted by the American Revolution will take root, and throughout the world, if man will learn to zealously guard his freedom, Peace and Progress will come to all the world. ~ Joseph Lewis

Having lived so long, I can't tell the difference between the two political parties. They both sound like broken records that started skipping after the founding fathers died. Now there were some real men! ~ Christopher Pike

A family from Mexico who arrived here this morning, legally, has as much right to the American dream as the direct descendants of the founding fathers ... when the blood of the sons of immigrants and the grandsons of slaves fell on foreign fields, it was American blood. In it you could not read the ethnic particulars of the soldier who died next to you. He was an American. And when I think of how we learned this lesson, I wonder [how] we could have unlearned it. ~ Bob Dole

There is no doubt where the founding fathers stood on this issue. They believed that people of faith should be permitted to express themselves in public. They believed that this country was big enough and free enough to allow expression of on enormous variety of views and beliefs. ~ John Cornyn

The idea of separating church and state by the Founding Fathers of America was freedom from the domination of one form of religion, because many of them left England, because they were persecuted by the church, because they want to express their Christian faith in a different way. So it was a bit of warfare between Christians. ~ John Lennox

Congress is functioning the way the Founding Fathers intended-not very well. They understood that if you move too quickly, our democracy will be less responsible to the majority. ~ Barber Conable

Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers. ~ John Ashcroft

I believe that only through a truly educated citizenry can the ideals that inspired the Founding Fathers of our nation be preserved and perpetuated. ~ David O. McKay

I hope we shall ... crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers ... How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? ~ Robert Jensen

The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized. ~ Michael Beschloss

The Founding Fathers' instructions were clear: The right to free speech includes bad speech; it means tolerance of ideas that many find obnoxious. ~ David Ignatius

To take a single step beyond the boundaries specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to definition. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The most successful people in history were made fun of, called "crazy", hated on, and ridiculed...because people didn't want to think a normal person like them could be successful. Thank God they didn't listen to the haters, because how else would the Founding Fathers of America establish America? - Kailin Gow, The American Adventure TV Series ~ Kailin Gow

Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in - the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill - and yet they neglected to include the right to vote. ~ Mo Rocca

It is the right to bear arms which is the problem. I think if the Founding Fathers knew what was happening they would be turning in their graves with embarrassment at how that law has been interpreted. ~ Liam Neeson

One reason the Founding Fathers thought that states should have two senators was so that smaller states wouldn't get run over and could bring their interests to the attention of the Senate more broadly. ~ Kent Conrad

The straight and narrow, so beloved of our founding fathers and all fathers thereafter, is now obviously and irrevocably bent. What is God trying to tell us ... ? ~ Larry Kramer

In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for Divine protection," he stated. "Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered ... Do we imagine we no longer need His assistance? ~ Benjamin Franklin

Authorities this broad give the national security bureaucracy the power to scrutinize the personal lives of every law-abiding American. Allowing that to continue is a grave error that demonstrates a willful ignorance of human nature. Moreover, it demonstrates a complete disregard for the responsibilities entrusted to us by the Founding Fathers to maintain robust checks and balances on the power of any arm of the government. That obviously raises some very serious questions. What happens to our government, our civil liberties and our basic democracy if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked? As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority. Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government. ~ Ron Wyden

I think that people have short memories, and I think that they believe that our forbearers in the past were these Founding Fathers who were ideal and who were - would never have stooped to dirty tricks. ~ Joseph Cummins

It is very extraordinary, if the head of the money department of a country, being unprincipled enough to sacrifice his trust and his integrity, could not have contrived objects of profit sufficiently large to have engaged the co-operation of men of far greater importance than Reynolds, and with whom there could have been due safety, and should have been driven to the necessity of unkennelling such a reptile to be the instrument of his cupidity. ~ Alexander Hamilton

This is the gay agenda: equality. Not special rights, but the rights that are already written by [our Founding Fathers]. ~ LZ Granderson

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate. ~ Claire McCaskill

Outlawing religion form the political arena is not what the Founding Fathers intended when they drafted the First Amendment. We do a grave disservice to our country by removing the influence of religion. If you separate God from the public arena, inevitably you separate good from our government. ~ Bill Bright

Many voters think about the makeup of the Supreme Court when they are choosing a president. The justices deal not only with constitutional issues but also with social issues that were unknown to the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution more than 200 years ago. ~ Helen Thomas

For as long as (the Founding Fathers of this nation) lived and led, they acknowledged the hand of the Almighty in the affairs of this republic. Our coinage and our currency carry the national motto. It simply says, 'In God We Trust.' I believe this is the foundation upon which this nation was established, an unequivocal trust in the power of the Almighty to guide and defend us. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis. ~ Donald Hall

The Founding Fathers envisioned a federal government that trusts its people with their money and freedom, outlining this limited, non-intrusive federal government in ... the Constitution, leaving the other powers to people ... or to the states. ~ Milton Friedman

But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Two hundred years ago, our Founding Fathers gave us a democracy. It was based upon the simple, yet noble, idea that government derives its validity from the consent of the governed. ~ Paul Tsongas

Many agricultural counties are far more important in the life of the State than their population bears to the entire population of the State. It is for this reason that I have never been in favor of restricting their representation in our State Senate to a strictly population basis. It is the same reason that the founding fathers of our country gave balanced representation to the States of the Union, equal representation in one House and proportionate representation based upon population in the other. ~ Earl Warren

In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Anarchy!" Tony confirmed in sort of a laugh.
"Sometimes I think, you know, if there were not cops, I would be fine, and I probably would. I was taught right from wrong when I was a kid. But the truth is, I drive completely different when there is a cop behind me than when there isn't."
And what Tony and I were talking about is true. It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in a system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn't make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the president. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. Is is as the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse. ~ Donald Miller

I do believe that it was through divine providence that the Founding Fathers drafted a document that created a government that didn't trust each other - hence the separation of powers. And then, to close the deal, the Bill of Rights was added to continue to protect individual rights and freedoms. ~ John Shimkus

I am a Republican because I believe in the constitution, strength in national defense, limited government, individual freedom, and personal responsibility as the concrete foundation for American government. They reinforce the resolve that the United States is the greatest country in the world and we can all be eternally grateful to our founding fathers for the beautiful legacy they left us today. ~ Martha Raye

Founders v. Bush brings the wisdom and eloquence of the Founding Fathers back to the people, while unmasking the fraudulent PR machine that is corrupting their words and stealing our legacy. ~ Jim Hightower

I inquired for Mrs. Reynolds and was shewn up stairs, at the head of which she met me and conducted me into a bed room. I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable. ~ Alexander Hamilton

The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated). ~ Mark Leibovich

They [the Founding Fathers] were intent upon establishing a Christian commonwealth in accordance with the principle of self-government. They were an inspired body of men. It has been said that God sifted the nations that He might send choice grain into the wilderness ... Who can fail to see it in the hand of Destiny? Who can doubt that it has been guided by a Divine Providence? ~ Calvin Coolidge

Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due. ~ Jon Stewart

The answer to 1984 is 1776 ~ Alex E. Jones

Alexander Hamilton Junior High School
-- SEMESTER REPORT --

STUDENT: Joseph Margolis
TEACHER: Janet Hicks

ENGLISH: A, ARITHMETIC: A, SOCIAL STUDIES: A, SCIENCE: A, NEATNESS: A, PUNCTUALITY: A, PARTICIPATION: A, OBEDIENCE: D

Teacher's Comments:
Joseph remains a challenging student. While I appreciate his creativity, I am sure you will agree that a classroom is an inappropriate forum for a reckless imagination. There is not a shred of evidence to support his claim that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian, and even fewer grounds to explain why he even knows what the word means. Similarly, an analysis of the Constitutional Convention does not generate sufficient cause to initiate a two-hour classroom debate on what types of automobiles the Founding Fathers would have driven were they alive today. When asked on a subsequent examination, "What did Benjamin Franklin use to discover electricity?" eleven children responded "A Packard convertible". I trust you see my problem.
[...]
Janet Hicks

Parent's Comments:
As usual I am very proud of Joey's grades. I too was unaware that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian. I assumed they were all Protestants.
Thank you for writing.
Ida Margolis ~ Steve Kluger

To contract new debts is not the way to pay old ones. ~ George Washington

We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes
and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. You know, the Lord can cause the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. ~ Bill Sali

How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy! ~ Thomas Jefferson

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties. ~ Norman Cousins

The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. ~ Noah Webster

Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business. ~ Edmund Morgan

I am a Christian in the only sense in which He wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to His doctrines in preference to all others. ~ Thomas Jefferson

We have seen a central government promote the power of labor-union bosses, and in turn be supported by that power, until it has become entirely too much a government of and for one class, which is exactly what our Founding Fathers wanted most to prevent. ~ Robert W. Welch, Jr.

As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity on both counts. ~ Shirley Chisholm

I usually don't have a burger, a brat, and a steak but it is 4th of July. And I need the energy if I'm gonna start blowin crap up. It's what the founding fathers would want. ~ Jim Gaffigan

The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife. ~ Thomas Jefferson

For the freedoms our founding fathers not only dreamed about, but made into reality. It is that same pursuit of freedom today that is helping to make our world a safer place. ~ John M. McHugh

The Founding Fathers of America never intended to stop people expressing their faith in the public square. But unfortunately that is the way it is happened. ~ John Lennox

This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance. ~ Gerhard Falk

You want to reclaim your country? You got to go back to the first men who started this country, the founding fathers and this is going to be shocking for the liberal professors out there that are indoctrinating our kids but the founding fathers believed in the Judeo-Christian god that believed we have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! You can pursuit it. If you don't get it, it's your fault! You messed up. Go back to work. Work harder. ~ Brad Stine

TOTALLY AMERICAN" personifies the dreams, inspiration, and ambition of the American people at a time we need it most. Reach deep in tribute to our founding Fathers, our Constitution, and our brave military forces. This is the fabric of America! ~ Stu Taylor

Obama's judges share his contempt for the original meaning of the Constitution. He has long seen the U.S. Constitution as an obstacle to what he considers progress. In a 2001 interview that surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaign, he made this very clear: the Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren had failed to break "free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution," Obama told the host of a radio show. ~ Phyllis Schlafly

I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. ~ Thomas Jefferson

All around the country, individuals are choosing to redefine their lives and the pursuit of happiness in ways much closer to the original notion put forth by our Founding Fathers. Their notion of the "pursuit of happiness" wasn't just about acquiring money and power, but about doing your part to add to the civic happiness of the community. ~ Arianna Huffington

Our Founding Fathers created the Executive Branch to implement and enforce the laws written by Congress, and vested this power in the president. ~ Tom Rice

I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.
This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.
Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.
This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT ~ Tim Thomas

A personal note to the Founding Fathers: We're sorry. We blew it. You made it possible for us to live free and we blew it. We've given up nearly every personal liberty in the name of a false sense of security sold to the masses by the same type of maniacal government about which you warned us and against which you fought so bravely. We now have to ask permission to take a leak on an airline flight. We never deserved you. ~ Philip D. Murphy

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly "veneration of wealth " are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. ~ Bill Moyers

The American Rebellion," about our founding fathers. Not till their foes were driven forth By England o'er the main - Not till the Frenchman from the North Had gone with shattered Spain; Not till the clean-swept oceans showed No hostile flag unrolled, Did they remember that they owed To Freedom - and were bold! ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: "[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor." He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: "When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture."
Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of "colonization," or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, "Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled."
In 1801 he looked forward to the day "when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface. ~ Jared Taylor

These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers. ~ Ronald Reagan

Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. ~ Benjamin Franklin

If the Founding Fathers could have looked into a crystal ball and seen AK-47s and Glock semi-automatic pistols, I think they would say, you know, 'That's not really what we mean when we say bear arms.' ~ Michael Moore

The inspired principles in the Constitution are the principles of the rule of law which, if preserved, guarantee liberty to every man. These principles are assumed in the Constitution because they had come to be assumed by Americans generally, as they struggled through several generations to find institutional safeguards for the liberty that they prized so highly. Many theoreticians of law and politics have rejected such a tenuous and fragile basis for a nation's freedom. They dream of constitutional arrangements based on clear libertarian principles which would maximize individual liberty whether or not the people understood or supported the basic principles. Their objection does raise the important secondary problem of preserving the liberty we have obtained.

The early Americans themselves recognized the necessity of "public virtue" for the continuing security of their liberty. . . .

The radicals of the left today seek freedom from social and material deprivation through the application of government power. On the right, according to your preferences in political taxonomy, we have either those libertarians who would go far beyond the classically liberal views of the Founding Fathers in restricting the role of government, or those reactionaries who would be willing to invoke arbitrarily the power of government to reshape moral society in their own image. Modern prophets seem to reject both the reactionary and radical left views. And in clearly recognizi ~ Noel B. Reynolds

[The Founding Fathers] were not advocates for a monolithic notion of "God and Country," as promoters of a Christian America would now have us believe. They were precisely the opposite: the very prototypes, in fact, of the East Coast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today's religious right. ~ Brooke Allen

Thousands of present day students, like many of our Founding Fathers, are being taught at home. ~ Ernest Istook

The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish. ~ Simon Schama

The land on which they (the Founding Fathers) formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we've torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it's ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us. ~ Melissa Harris-Perry

And despite what the loudmouth liberal lunatics squawk, our Founding Fathers fully intended for the United States of America to be a Christian nation. Always has been, still is, forever should be. ~ Captain Chris

It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community. ~ David Barton

When the Founding Fathers arrived here in Philadelphia to forge a new nation, they didn't come as Democrats or Republicans or to nominate a presidential candidate. They came as patriots who feared party politics. ~ Michael Bloomberg

Our Founding Fathers were proud that Americans were trusted with arms because they knew that only when people are armed could they truly be thought of as free citizens. And that's where the circle closes. Those who want to deprive you of your right to keep and bear arms are intending to deprive you of your freedom, period. Like the criminals their policies encourage, these elitists know that it is always best to disarm victims before you enslave them. ~ Charley Reese

The Founding Fathers were nothing more than a bunch of snobby English shits. ~ Donald Freed

In the United States, the Constitution is a health chart left by the Founding Fathers which shows whether or not the body politic is in good health. If the national body is found to be in poor health, the Founding Fathers also left a prescription for the restoration of health called the Declaration of Independence. ~ Dick Gregory

Maintaining checks and balances on the power of the Judiciary Branch and the other two branches is vital to keep the form of government set up by our Founding Fathers. ~ Todd Tiahrt

Defeat appears to me preferable to total Inaction. ~ John Adams

Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again - the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years. ~ Neal Boortz

Yes here's to the founding fathers - slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes ... ~ David Mazzucchelli

Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. ~ Barack Obama

Our Founding Fathers were the first to articulate the reasons for their First Amendment, the same reasons given by Learned Hand, and by Justice Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan . It is a lesson we keep forgetting and must relearn in each succeeding generation. ~ Gilbert S. Merritt, Jr.

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote ... that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country. ~ Samuel Adams