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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• “The challenge of statesmanship is to have the vision to dream of a better, safer world and the courage, persistence, and patience to turn that dream into reality.” ~Ronald Reagan
  

• We could say they spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money ~Ronald Reagan
  

• “In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” ~John Adams, Inaugural Address, 1797
  

• “The value of liberty was thus enhanced in our estimation by the difficulty of its attainment, and the worth of characters appreciated by the trial of adversity.” ~George Washington, letter to the people of South Carolina, 1790
  

• “A socialist is somebody who doesn’t have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.” ~Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), who, ironically, was a socialist
  

• “The history of the race, and each individual’s experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.” ~Mark Twain (1835-1910)
  

• “An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation.” ~John Marshall
  

• “The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it.” ~James Madison, letter to James Monroe, 1824
  

• “[T]he courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” ~Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78
  

• “[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes — rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments.” ~Alexander Hamilton