Voting Founding Fathers Quotes

[The spirit of party] opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty.

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.

In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate-look to his character.

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote…that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.

We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands; we have a check upon two branches of the legislature.

Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country.

Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

For an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

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.

The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men.

Let me … warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.