“However [political parties]may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
George Washington
“We have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Thomas Jefferson
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”
James Madison
“Peace is the best time for improvement and preparation of every kind; it is in peace that our commerce flourishes most, that taxes are most easily paid, and that the revenue is most productive.”
James Monroe
“Posterity — you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”
John Quincy Adams
“The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough.”
Andrew Jackson
“The national will is the supreme law of the Republic, and on all subjects within the limits of his constitutional powers should be faithfully obeyed by the public servant.”
Martin Van Buren
“The only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.”
William Henry Harrison
“Everything dependent on human action is liable to abuse.”
John Tyler
“I am heartily rejoiced that my term is so near its close. I will soon cease to be a servant and will become a sovereign.”
James K. Polk
It would be judicious to act with magnanimity towards a prostrate foe.”
Zachary Taylor
“An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory.”
Millard Fillmore
“The storm of frenzy and faction must inevitably dash itself in vain against the unshaken rock of the Constitution.”
Franklin Pierce
“The ballot box is the surest arbiter of disputes among freemen.”
James Buchanan
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Honest conviction is my courage; the Constitution is my guide.”
Andrew Johnson
“The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.”
Ulysses S. Grant
“To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible.”
Rutherford B. Hayes
“Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.”
James Garfield
“God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.”
Chester A. Arthur
“Whatever you do, tell the truth.”
Grover Cleveland
“I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth or shapes it into a garment will starve in the process.”
Benjamin Harrison
“That’s all a man can hope for during his lifetime – to set an example – and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history.”
William McKinley
“To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“We are all imperfect. We can not expect perfect government.”
William Howard Taft
“I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.”
Woodrow Wilson
“There is something inherently wrong, something out of accord with the ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain amid defensive war while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation.”
Warren G. Harding
“Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.”
Calvin Coolidge
“You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people’s souls and thoughts… Every step in that direction poisons the very roots of liberalism. It poisons political equality, free speech, free press, and equality of opportunity. It is the road not to more liberty but to less liberty.”
Herbert Hoover
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Those who want the government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.”
Harry S. Truman
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron… Is there no other way the world may live?”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.”
John F. Kennedy
“A president’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.”
Lyndon B. Johnson
“The greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes; because only if you’ve been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain… Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember: Others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win, unless you hate them. And then, you destroy yourself.”
Richard M. Nixon
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
Gerald R. Ford
“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
James Carter
“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan
“Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.”
George H. W. Bush
“We must teach our children to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.”
William J. Clinton
“America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.”
George W. Bush
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
Barack Obama
