The Deterioration of Government

The deterioration of every government begins with
the decay of the principles on which it was founded
~Charles-Louis de Secondat

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• “It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.” ~John Adams (1756)
  

• “It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1785)
  

• “I have not yet begun to fight!” ~John Paul Jones (1779)
  

• “The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1808)
  

• “Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society.” ~James Madison (1788)
  

• “When Men are employ’d they are best contented. For on the Days they work’d they were good-natur’d and chearful; and with the consciousness of having done a good Days work they spent the Evenings jollily; but on the idle Days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with their Pork, the Bread, and in continual ill-humour.” ~Benjamin Franklin (1771)
  

• “It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” ~James Madison (1788)
  

• “It is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our government… Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever persuasion, religious or political.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1801)
  

• “[The Judiciary] 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.” ~Alexander Hamilton (1788)
  

• “Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors.” ~Justice Joseph Story (1833)