Our Wise Founding Fathers

[Richard Roberts]

John Adams

Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other

Samuel Chase

The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.

William Ellery

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

Elbridge Gerry

Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.

Alexander Hamilton

The instrument by which it [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.

-= Federalist No. 78, 1788 =-

[The Judicial Branch] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

-= Federalist No. 78, 1788 =-

Patrick Henry

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is a instrument for the people to restrain the government...

Thomas Jefferson

A private central bank issuing the public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army." We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."

When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."

Richard Henry Lee

The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.

James Madison

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species.

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

-= Federalist No. 48, February 1, 1788 =-

If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.

-= letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792 =-

 

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.

-= Federalist No. 45, January 26, 1788 =-

Thomas Paine

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined, nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides from an unarmed man, may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.