- “Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters.” –Samuel Adams
Nothing is more essential . . .
Newspapers …
- “Newspapers … serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1802
To the haranguers of the populace . . .
- “To the haranguers of the populace among the ancients, succeed among the moderns your writers of political pamphlets and news-papers, and your coffee-house talkers.” –Benjamin Franklin, Reply to Coffee House Orators, 1767
We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press . . .
- “We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper’s ally, It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.” –Fisher Ames, Review of the Pamphlet on the State of the British Constitution, 1807
The pyramid of government-and a republican government . . .
- “The pyramid of government-and a republican government may well receive that beautiful and solid form-should be raised to a dignified altitude: but its foundations must, of consequence, be broad, and strong, and deep. The authority, the interests, and the affections of the people at large are the only foundation, on which a superstructure proposed to be at once durable and magnificent, can be rationally erected.” –James Wilson, Legislative Department, 1804
Governments are instituted among men . . .
- “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” –Declaration of Independence
It is an unquestionable truth . . .
- “It is an unquestionable truth, that the body of the people in every country desire sincerely its prosperity. But it is equally unquestionable that they do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government. To deny that they are frequently led into the grossest of errors, by misinformation and passion, would be a flattery which their own good sense must despise.” –Alexander Hamilton, speech to the Ratifying Convention of New York, 1788
The essence of Government . . .
- “The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” –James Madison
The true corrective of abuses . . .
- “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820
Giving to the unknown . . .
- “[W]hy give through agents whom we know not, to persons whom we know not, and in countries from which we get no account, where we can do it at short hand, to objects under our eye, through agents we know, and to supply wants we see?” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Michael Megear, 1823
