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The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

James Madison

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James Madison
Age: 85 †
Born: 1751
Born: March 16
Died: 1836
Died: June 28
4Th U.S. President
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James Madison
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Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.
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Measures should be enacted which, without violating the rights of property, would reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.
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We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.
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Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.
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The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.
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The Constitution of the U.S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion.
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The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.
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What is the structure of government that will best guard against the precipitate counsels and factious combinations for unjust purposes, without a sacrifice of the fundamental principle of republicanism?
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A public debt is a public curse.
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Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.
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We have the self-evident right to regulate our trade according to our own will and our own interest . . . . This right can be denied to no independent nation.
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There never was an assembly of men, charged with a great and arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them.
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How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation?
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A distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring it.
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A people armed and free, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression.
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What a perversion of the normal order of things! ... to make power the primary and central object of the social system, and Liberty but its satellite.
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The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter,to a small number of citizens elected by the rest secondly, the greater number of citizens and greater sphere of country over which the latter may be extended.
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Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.
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... the State Legislatures will jealously and closely watch the operations of this Government, and be able to resist with more effect every assumption of power, than any other power on earth can do and the greatest opponents to a Federal Government admit the State Legislatures to be sure guardians of the people's liberty.
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It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a misfortune. This necessity however exists and the problem to be solved is, not what form of Government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect.
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