Our Founders Quotes

#1. We could have been called reapers," Goddard said, "but our founders saw fit to call us scythes - because we are the weapons in mankind's immortal hand. You are a fine weapon, Rowan, sharp, and precise. And when you strike, you are glorious to behold.

Neal Shusterman

#2. Big-government proponents embrace both the power of the federal government and the idea that millions of Americans ought to be dependent on its largesse. It's time to return to our Founders' love for small government. More is not always better.

Gary Bauer

#3. Our Founders always wondered about how long it would last. The price of liberty is everlasting vigilance. You've got to be on your guard every minute or you will lose it.

Michael Novak

#4. I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that it will prevail, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time.

Barack Obama

#5. Our Founders warned against this. They said don't ... that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they, um, get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government, liberty is done; freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there.

Sharron Angle

#6. The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.

Ron Paul

#7. What both the left and the right overlook is our Founders' wisdom about the limits and dangers of government.

Ed Crane

#8. The Second Amendment is timeless for our Founders grasped that self-defense is three-fold: every free individual must protect themselves against the evil will of the man, the mob and the state.

Tiffany Madison

#9. Our founders insisted that protecting the states' power to govern themselves was vital to limit the power of Washington and preserve freedom.

Mike Pence

#10. If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our Democracy; Tonight is your answer.

Barack Obama

#11. Our founders never intended us to have a professional political class.

Carly Fiorina

#12. For the record, I believe elected officials should talk about faith. Our founders believed the moral principles of faith were indispensable to our nation's survival. The Declaration of Independence mentions God four times.

Gary Bauer

#13. I believe strongly in the Constitutional principle of separating church and state. Our founders were right in fearing that religious freedom would be threatened in the long run by a departure from governmental neutrality in spiritual matters.

Sargent Shriver

#14. Live the principles and the values. Almost nobody in America is living them. Learn the truth. Live the life of our founders. Be a decent, righteous, forthright honest man or woman.

Beck

#15. We have allowed an unholy alliance of government - the new monarchy - and corporate influence - the new aristocracy - to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder.

Marianne Williamson

#16. The Federalist Society is changing the culture of our nation's law schools. You are returning the values and concepts of law as our founders understood them to scholarly dialogue, and through that dialogue, to our legal institutions.

Ronald Reagan

#17. Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders, they wish they had done earlier, and that is ... simply writing down how you do things and why you do things.

Sam Altman

#18. Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.

Karen Armstrong

#19. I want a president who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters, a president who truly believes in the vision that our Founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story.

Michelle Obama

#20. Our founders did not write that We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.

Edward Snowden

#21. Today, most Americans are too cynical, or tired, or both, to even approximate our Founders' courageous repudiation of injustice.

Marianne Williamson

#22. You don't just give the executive branch unlimited resources, unlimited power. Our founders were very concerned about too much power being invested in any one, in any branch. The balance of power is fundamental to our system.

Mike Huckabee

#23. Our Founders explicitly designed our system so that all powers not delegated to the federal government (education included) fell to the states or the people; they believed that parents, not government officials, have the moral right to decide what their children are taught.

Glenn Beck

#24. The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we've changed this country before.

Barack Obama

#25. Our founders made it extraordinarily difficult to amend the Constitution.

Barack Obama

#26. The challenge is always before us. Whenever we lose sight of the principles that mattered to our founders we run into trouble.

Jesse Helms

#27. Because of my upbringing, I believe in things like limited government, fiscal responsibility and personal accountability. I believe in the wisdom of our founders and the sanctity of our Constitution.

John Thune

#28. Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

Cory Booker

#29. I'm honored to serve as mayor of my hometown where our founders started America with three simple words: 'We, the people.' And when they said 'people' they didn't mean 'corporations.'

Michael Nutter

#30. Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature's God, not from government.

Paul Ryan

#31. Our founders did not oust George III in order for us to crown Richard I.

Ralph Nader

#32. We believe, as our founders did, that 'the pursuit of happiness' depends upon individual liberty; and individual liberty requires limited government.

Paul Ryan

#33. Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity.

Alan Keyes

#34. Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant - they're quite clear - that we would create law based on the God of the bible and the Ten Commandments.

Sarah Palin

#35. The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.

Walter E. Williams

#36. We honor founders of these starving cities,
Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.

W. H. Auden

#37. Should founders of our lands one day wake up for a moment from their lasting sleep to see the lands and things they founded, they shall really have so many reasons to ponder over their lasting footprints!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#38. No, the founders of our culture didn't just fall into a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture, they had to whip themselves into it, and the whip they used was this meme: Growing all your own food is the best way to live. Nothing less could imaginably have done this amazing trick.

Daniel Quinn

#39. I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary. My heart goes out to his family, everyone at Apple and everyone who has been touched by his work,

Steve Ballmer

#40. The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers - one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times - both in war, and in peace.

Al Franken

#41. Our culture has forgotten what the Founders knew: The American experiment is a moral, not just a political, exercise.

Charles Colson

#42. The First Continental Congress made its first act a prayer, the beginning of a great tradition. We have then a lesson from the founders of our land. That lesson is clear: That in the winning of freedom and in the living of life, the first step is prayer.

Ronald Reagan

#43. Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.

Walt Whitman

#44. If you want to feel the life and the body of great men who are long gone, go to their tombs or monuments; if you want to understand the real life and the wisdom of great men who are long gone, go to their libraries!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#45. The truth is that our democracy is a work in progress. We are all its founders. We are all learning that we are linked and not ranked.

Amy Richards

#46. Our flag honors those who have fought to protect it, and is a reminder of the sacrifice of our nation's founders and heroes. As the ultimate icon of America's storied history, the Stars and Stripes represents the very best of this nation.

Joe Barton

#47. From Samuel Adams to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Hamilton, all the Founders intended religion to provide a moral anchor for our liberty in democracy.

William Bennett

#48. The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens.

Walter E. Williams

#49. Our government is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind these States together was one of love and mutual good offices ...

Jefferson Davis

#50. It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

Charles A. Beard

#51. We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic. There is no way to improve upon that. But what we can do is to find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.

Barbara Jordan

#52. It is our sacred duty to transmit unimpaired to our posterity the blessings of liberty which were bequeathed to us by the founders of the Republic.

Andrew Johnson

#53. Founders v. Bush brings the wisdom and eloquence of the Founding Fathers back to the people, while unmasking the fraudulent PR machine that is corrupting their words and stealing our legacy.

Jim Hightower

#54. Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy.

Ron Paul

#55. Way back in 1831, Michael Faraday, one of the founders of our modern understanding of electromagnetism, was asked by an inquiring politician about the usefulness of this newfangled "electricity" stuff. His apocryphal reply: "I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it".

Sean Carroll

#56. Two centuries ago our nation's birth was a milestone in the long quest for freedom, but the bold and brilliant dream which excited the founders of our nation still awaits its consummation. I have no new dream to set forth today, but rather urge a fresh faith in the old dream.

Jimmy Carter

#57. Self-proclaimed saviors and other outliers come and go throughout our political history. Occasionally, they're successful; most times, they're not. But the system has rebalanced toward the basic principles of tolerance, freedom and democracy that were set forth by the Founders.

David Ignatius

#58. The Founders never intended for Americans to trust their government. Our entire Constitution was predicated on the notion that government was a necessary evil, to be restrained and minimized as much as possible.

Rand Paul

#59. Our goals are the same as those of the U.N.'s founders, who sought to replace a world at war with one where the rule of law would prevail, where human rights were honored, where development would blossom, where conflict would give way to freedom from violence.

Ronald Reagan

#60. But, neither of these educational scenarios worked for us, so when we started a family, we wanted a different school for our children. And the other founders felt the same way.

Daniel Greenberg

#61. Entrepreneurship is the very back bone of our country and what makes us great - we are a nation of founders.

Nancy Lublin

#62. If we can return to a government that the Founders, in their wisdom, envisioned for us, we can return to a government that will allow our economy to thrive again, and our people to live in liberty.

Nan Hayworth

#63. We work as a team. I think having the individual being shown as a star actually creates problems internally. We encourage all our investors to work as a team for the benefit of the founders.

Douglas Leone

#64. Our mission is to help founders and anyone or anything that helps founders helps us with our mission.

Naval Ravikant

#65. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective- a new world order-can emerge ... We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders.

George H. W. Bush

#66. On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes.

Karl Jaspers