Quotes About James Madison

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact--observable, discernible, undeniable fact.

This argument made logical and legal sense to almost everyone except the Virginians, who were accustomed to thinking of the Old Dominion as an empire of its own, with the Ohio Valley and the Kentucky as extensions of greater Virginia. Even James Madison, the most nonprovincial member of the Virginia delegation, felt obliged to defend his state's claim to Kentucky's border, though he opposed the threat of the Virginia legislature to revoke its previous cession.

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.

As Bob Dole found out, you can't keep a positive image while being your party's mouthpiece in Congress. That's why no legislative leader since James Madison has ever been elected president.

James Madison wrote, "each state … is considered as a sovereign body independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation then the new Constitution will … be a. federal and not a national constitution.

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.

The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.

Elbridge Gerry, the fifth vice president of the United States—under President James Madison—and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. (Due to his incessant fiddling with voter districts in Massachusetts to shape them in his favor, Elbridge Gerry infamously inspired the term "gerrymandering.")

Among the most influential of these was George Mason, who wrote the Virginia constitution and its Declaration of Rights. Responding to the insistent demands of Mason and several others, as well as to similar voices outside the Convention, Mason's fellow Virginian, James Madison, drafted ten amendments that were ratified in 1789–90 by eleven states, more than a sufficient number for their adoption.

Is there no virtue among us?" asked James Madison, rhetorically. "If there be not, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.

them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating. As James Madison put it when advocating the Bill of Rights, the mere knowledge of its existence would "extinguish from the bosom of every member of the community any apprehensions, that there are those among his countrymen who wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.

As Bob Dole found out, you can't keep a positive image while being your party's mouthpiece in Congress. That's why no legislative leader since James Madison has ever been elected president.

But as a war time president James Madison did not display dynamic leadership. Andrew Jackson acknowledged Madison " a great civilian," but declared " the mind of a philosopher could not dwell on blood and carnage with any composure," and judged his talents " not fitted for a stormy sea.

In the House, James Madison helped to compress dozens of changes to the Constitution recommended by the state conventions into twelve amendments; the first ten, when ratified by the states, would be known as the Bill of Rights.

James Madison said in 1788: "Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

some of those who crafted the Constitution had serious doubts about tax-supported clergy. James Madison, for example, wrote that such employment was a "palpable violation of equal rights as well as Constitutional principles" and a "national establishment" of religion.10 He suggested that if Congress wanted chaplains to discharge religious duties, members should pay for them from their own pockets. "How just would it be in its principle!" he proclaimed.

America's oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.

A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, "I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers' case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument." Of course, what this dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and the Virginia statesman and Rights-man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense, particularly when his "morality" abolishes their gift to all of us, the Bill of Rights.

The forefathers, including James Madison, felt very strongly that the duties that we owe to God were outside of government's prerogative, that government had no business interfering with the way we worship God.

Do not separate text from historical background," admonished James Madison. "If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.

It is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.

In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called slavery "a cruel war against human nature itself."1 James Madison argued that "it would be wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."2 Benjamin Franklin, a former slaveholder, described slavery as "an atrocious debasement of human nature."3 But in the early days of the republic, slavery remained legal, the law of the land.

It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute.