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The sayings of James Madison:
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.
A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.
A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.
Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.
As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.
By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.
Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.
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.
Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.
Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.
Country
United States
Interests
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.
I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment.
James Madison
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
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.
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
In no instance have... the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.
In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
Philosophy is common sense with big words.
Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.
The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.
20thCenturyMadison
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