Quotes About Founders

Our founders insisted that protecting the states' power to govern themselves was vital to limit the power of Washington and preserve freedom.

I was disappointed in how [Bill] Clinton, like [Jimmy] Carter, used the founders to argue for huge expansions in federal power, clearly beyond what the founders could have ever conceived.

I invoke the genius of the Constitution.

History suggests that a cult graduates into a church if it outlives its founders.

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.

[John] Adams never hid his jealousy and resentment of the other Founders, especially Benjamin Franklin.

There is no allusion to marriage or family in the Constitution. It is barely mentioned in the Federalist Papers or elsewhere in the ratification debates. The reason why the founders "ignored" the family was that it was not an issue for them. It was not a social problem. On the contrary, the family was the accepted substratum of society. It

The Ancients subjected themselves to a fierce discipline of detachment from public opinion. Although they inevitably had to try to influence political life in their favor, they never seriously thought of themselves as founders or lawgivers. The mixture of unwise power and powerless wisdom, in the ancients view, would always end up with power strengthened and wisdom compromised. He who flirts with power, Socrates said, will be compelled to lie with it.

Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.

The first time I went through YC, it was smaller, and the founders were younger. The advantage of that was that the set of founders who were older than us had really seen the Web 1.0 meltdown. They brought that knowledge to us.

My OkCupid co-founders are my best friends. We were in each other's weddings.

In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

Our founders never intended us to have a professional political class.

The founders of Draken and the senior management team all fly one of the positions in the Black Diamond jet team.

'E pluribus unum' is perhaps the most obnoxious motto the Founders could have come up with, as far as liberals are concerned. They don't mind the e pluribus part - they love to note the things that divide and separate us. But they positively despise the unum part.

The Constitution is a document that should only be amended with great caution.

The next generation of innovators, who need neutrality the most, are not at the bargaining table. They're hard at work in their labs or classrooms, dreaming of the next big thing, and hoping that the Internet is as open to them as it was to the founders of Google.

I find talented, driven, boundlessly ambitious people and help them solve problems that will hopefully improve the lives of millions. Sometimes this means investing in startup founders. Other times, it involves helping organize and fundraise for charity or politics.

To me, patriotism means dedication to the principles on which the country was founded and a willingness to stand firm and fight for these principles regardless of what the government says or does

Americans today sometimes assume the Founders' references to God or Nature or the Supreme Ruler were just for impact or for propaganda. Not so. These were tightly reasoned statements of legal principles. Your rights to your life, liberty, and property came from your Creator, not the government; these rights cannot be repealed.

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founders' than any other agency in the world.

The Founders' Constitution is a deal. You get an American nation, but you must accept slavery. That's a bargain with evil, a deal with the devil. And like most deals with the devil, it doesn't work out very well.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

That is good. It is a law of nature. That is the way with all founders of religion. Without persecution superior ideas cannot penetrate into the heart of society.