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.
JAMES MADISONA popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
JAMES MADISONThe internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.
JAMES MADISONOf all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
JAMES MADISONIf 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.
JAMES MADISONEach generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.
JAMES MADISONDespotism 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.
JAMES MADISONThe truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
JAMES MADISONWherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.
JAMES MADISONTo suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
JAMES MADISONA well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.
JAMES MADISONIt 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.
JAMES MADISONWhat is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
JAMES MADISONAll men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.
JAMES MADISONThat part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.
JAMES MADISONLearned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people.
JAMES MADISONLiberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
JAMES MADISON