Wisdom of the Founders
This will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins
Benjamin Franklin
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“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”
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Charles Carroll"Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments."
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John Jay"No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent."
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"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.."
Thomas Jefferson
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“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, not your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
Samuel Adams
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My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson
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"Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source -- from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives."
John Dickinson****
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.
-Alexander Hamilton
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"If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield."
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"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. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
—James Madison, letter to W.T. Barry, 1822
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Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.John Adams
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Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.
Patrick Henry
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To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.
Richard Henry Lee
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Sad will be the day when the American people forget their traditions and their history, and no longer remember that the country they love, the institutions they cherish, and the freedom they hope to preserve, were born from the throes of armed resistance to tyranny, and nursed in the rugged arms of fearless men.Roger Sherman
http://amteaparty.blogspot.com/p/dreams-from-our-fathers.html http://amteaparty.blogspot.com/p/dreams-from-our-fathers.html
"The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves."William Ellery
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"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."Richard Henry Lee
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"Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments."Charles Carroll
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