Fisher Ames Quotes

#1. A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.

Fisher Ames

#2. [Why] should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book? Its morals are pure, its examples captivating and noble. The reverence for the Sacred Book that is thus early impressed lasts long; and probably if not impressed in infancy, never takes firm hold of the mind.

Fisher Ames

#3. No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

Fisher Ames

#4. The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.

Fisher Ames

#5. A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

Fisher Ames

#6. The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.

Fisher Ames

#7. [the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.

Fisher Ames

#8. America is rising with a giant's strength. Its bones are yet but cartilages.

Fisher Ames

#9. Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.

Fisher Ames

#10. A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices, and ambitions of their leaders is a democracy.

Fisher Ames

#11. I consider biennial elections as a security that the sober, second thought of the people shall be law.

Fisher Ames

#12. All such men are, or ought to be, agreed, that simple governments are despotisms; and of all despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent.

Fisher Ames

#13. A large portion of our citizens, who will not believe, even on the evidence of facts, that any public evils exist, or are impending. They deride the apprehensions of those who foresee, that licentiousness will prove, as it ever has proved, fatal to liberty.

Fisher Ames

#14. Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits ... it is founded on morals and religion, whose authority reigns in the heart, and on the influence all these produce on public opinion before that opinion governs rulers.

Fisher Ames

#15. Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.

Fisher Ames

#16. Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.

Fisher Ames

#17. We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press ... It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.

Fisher Ames

#18. No man can be a sound lawyer in this land who is not well read in the ethics of Moses and the virtues of Jesus.

Fisher Ames

#19. The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.

Fisher Ames

#20. We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge.

Fisher Ames

#21. That can never be reasoned down which was not reasoned up.

Fisher Ames

#22. I have heard it remarked that men are not to be reasoned out of an opinion they have not reasoned themselves into.

Fisher Ames

#23. The gentleman puts me in mind of an old hen which persists in setting after her eggs are taken away.

Fisher Ames