Top 100 Quotes About Founding Fathers
#1. The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.
Ron Paul
#2. No I'm not. It might benefit you to go back and have a look at what some of our founding fathers really believed, instead of relying so much on what people these days tell you they believed.
Harper Lee
#3. If we fulfill our responsibility to the Constitution, the Supreme Court will be filled with superior legal minds who will pursue the one agenda that our founding fathers intended in writing the Constitution: justice, rather than political or personal goals.
Chuck Grassley
#4. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.
Sharron Angle
#5. Boy did he hate banks. He told me once that the Founding Fathers worried more about banks than they worried about the British. They knew that banks had been causing chaos, bringing empires to their knees, for centuries, all in the name of free enterprise. Photographer
J.R. Moehringer
#6. I would very much like to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this.
John Kennedy Toole
#7. I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This is not for law enforcement. This is for us. And, in fact, when you read that Constitution and the Founding Fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny.
Sharron Angle
#8. The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.
Steven Van Zandt
#9. When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential.
Azar Nafisi
#10. Insofar as we have freedoms, it's not because some great wise Founding Fathers granted them to us. It's because people like us insisted on exercising those freedoms - by doing exactly what we're doing here - before anyone was willing to acknowledge that they had them.
David Graeber
#11. Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.
John Ashcroft
#12. The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?)
Tina Packer
#13. Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business.
Edmund Morgan
#14. From a constitutional standpoint, the religion of a candidate is supposed to make no difference. Even before the founding fathers dreamed up the First Amendment, they inserted a provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting any religious test for office.
Noah Feldman
#15. Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God's help, it will continue to be.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#16. Our founding fathers never intended that Congress be a career.
Rush Limbaugh
#17. One legislator accused me of having a 19th century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an 18th century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law abiding citizens should be one of government's primary concerns.
Jeffrey Gitomer
#18. I was musically baptized by the black founding fathers of rock-and-roll, and like all real music lovers, the music changed, enriched, upgraded and fortified our lives forever.
Ted Nugent
#19. A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.
Sam Ervin
#20. This is the gay agenda: equality. Not special rights, but the rights that are already written by [our Founding Fathers].
LZ Granderson
#21. The Founding Fathers are not just some people that happened to get mad a long time ago and want their freedom. They were special people in addition to what their natural yearnings were.
Rush Limbaugh
#22. The founding fathers went out of their way to establish a clear "wall of separation" between religion and state, to quote Thomas Jefferson. They reasoned, as James Madison so cleverly articulated, that both religion and government exist in greater purity if kept apart.
Phil Zuckerman
#23. My answer to the racial problem in America is to not deal with it at all. The founding fathers dealt with it when they made the Constitution.
James Meredith
#24. The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,
Harry Reid
#26. The seal and the constitution, reflects the thinking of the founding fathers that this was to be a nation by white people, and for white people. Native Americans, Blacks, and all other non-white people, were to be the burden bearers for the real citizens of this nation.
Louis Farrakhan
#27. If we are to continue to have the freedoms that came of the inspiration of the Almighty to our Founding Fathers, we must return to the God who is their true Author.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#28. The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. ROBERT BELLAH1
Gregory A. Boyd
#29. The straight and narrow, so beloved of our founding fathers and all fathers thereafter, is now obviously and irrevocably bent. What is God trying to tell us ... ?
Larry Kramer
#30. Congress is functioning the way the Founding Fathers intended-not very well. They understood that if you move too quickly, our democracy will be less responsible to the majority.
Barber Conable
#31. When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself.
Ronald Reagan
#32. I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.
Thomas Szasz
#33. The founding fathers never once rationalized getting in power and having control so they could stay in power.
Tom Coburn
#34. And quit bringing up our forefathers and saying they were civil libertarians. Our founding fathers would have never tolerated any of this crap. For God's sake, they were blowing peoples' heads off because they put a tax on their breakfast beverage. And it wasn't even coffee.
Dennis Miller
#35. Government is necessary for our survival. We need government in order to survive. The Founding Fathers created a special place for government. It is called the Constitution.
Michael Badnarik
#36. The Warren Court wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution ... I intend to succeed where they failed.
Barack Obama
#37. You need only 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 great struggle for independence.
Charles A. Beard
#38. What the Founding Fathers created in the Constitution is the most magnificent government on the face of the Earth, and the reason is this: because it was intended to preserve the American society and the American spirit, not to transform it or destroy it.
Mark Levin
#39. we revere our founding fathers precisely because they were loudmouths on the subject of freedom: Give me liberty or give me death!
Susan Cain
#40. Those who enjoy the blessings of liberty under a divinely inspired constitution should promote morality, and they should practice what the Founding Fathers called civic virtue.
Dallin H. Oaks
#41. The Founding Fathers believed that faith in God was the key to our being a good people and America's becoming a great nation.
Ronald Reagan
#42. Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. This is a group I've previously called Obama's founding fathers.
Dinesh D'Souza
#43. The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people.
Hugo Black
#44. Are you a Loyalist or a Patriot? Why, because being a God-fearing, self-reliant, freedom-loving American is a choice. Or we could be one of those government-dependent, Constitution-fearing socialists. That's the question, actually, the Founding Fathers asked. Are you a Loyalist or a Patriot?
Matt Shea
#45. I think that people have short memories, and I think that they believe that our forbearers in the past were these Founding Fathers who were ideal and who were - would never have stooped to dirty tricks.
Joseph Cummins
#46. Partly because his life ended before the age of 50, Hamilton was defined by the other founding fathers, and he managed, with amazing consistency, to alienate most of them.
Ron Chernow
#47. All the warnings the founding fathers gave us about government proved to be true. We should have listened.
James Cook
#48. Our Founding Fathers would be proud of all that America has achieved, and will continue to achieve, in the coming years.
John Linder
#49. Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands ... 'Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.
Ilana Mercer
#50. When you can't do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damned secret, then we're on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.
Harry S. Truman
#51. These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers.
Ronald Reagan
#52. Our Founding Fathers were the first to articulate the reasons for their First Amendment, the same reasons given by Learned Hand, and by Justice Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan . It is a lesson we keep forgetting and must relearn in each succeeding generation.
Gilbert S. Merritt Jr.
#53. If our founding fathers were alive today, they'd roll over in their graves.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#54. 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
#55. The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
#56. You can't convince me that the founding fathers wouldn't allow you to secede.
Glenn Beck
#57. We have seen a central government promote the power of labor-union bosses, and in turn be supported by that power, until it has become entirely too much a government of and for one class, which is exactly what our Founding Fathers wanted most to prevent.
Robert W. Welch Jr.
#58. I believe we have become paralyzed, paralyzed by our desire to be loved. Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country's principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.
Chris Christie
#59. It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community.
David Barton
#60. We can only solve our biggest problems if we come together and embrace the freedoms that our Founding Fathers established right here in Philadelphia, which permitted our ancestors to create the great American exceptionalism that all of us now enjoy.
Michael Bloomberg
#61. The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.
Michael Beschloss
#62. In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#63. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.
Donald Hall
#64. Hey, our Founding Fathers wore long hair and powdered wigs - I don't see anybody trying to look like them today, either ... But we do look to them as role models.
Leigh Steinberg
#65. I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.
Marc Andreessen
#66. We must bring the rule of law to its full fruition in the United States, and when we do, we will have achieved the goals and rhetoric of our Founding Fathers.
David Boies
#67. Have you seen the Olympic uniforms? It's for the American Olympic team and it's berets. To me, nothing says America like a guy in a beret. Look at our founding fathers, they all wore berets.
David Letterman
#68. Second, marriage is an issue that our Founding Fathers wisely left to the states.
Judy Biggert
#69. I'm a Progressive. Much in the same way our founding fathers - who, oddly enough, wouldn't get elected today - were Progressives.
Will Ferrell
#70. The Founding Fathers envisioned a federal government that trusts its people with their money and freedom, outlining this limited, non-intrusive federal government in ... the Constitution, leaving the other powers to people ... or to the states.
Milton Friedman
#71. Two hundred years ago, our Founding Fathers gave us a democracy. It was based upon the simple, yet noble, idea that government derives its validity from the consent of the governed.
Paul Tsongas
#72. If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.
Stephen Colbert
#73. In the summer of 1776 our Founding Fathers sought to secure our independence and the liberties that remain the foundation of our nation today.
Doc Hastings
#74. The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.
Mark Leibovich
#75. One reason the Founding Fathers thought that states should have two senators was so that smaller states wouldn't get run over and could bring their interests to the attention of the Senate more broadly.
Kent Conrad
#76. While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty. On
Ron Chernow
#77. The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
Ayn Rand
#78. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.
Barack Obama
#79. Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men trying to achieve a good balance? In fact, they did not want a balance, except one which kept things as they were, a balance among the dominant forces at that time.
Howard Zinn
#80. The founding fathers gave the House of Representatives one function when it comes to cleansing the office of the presidency and that is impeachment, .. Whether or not a resolution of censure is appropriate is something beyond our constitutional authority.
Henry Hyde
#81. Throughout his long career, Washington earned the adulation not merely of ordinary people but of the other luminaries whom we now hail as 'founding fathers.'
Edmund Morgan
#82. The Tea Party is simply a loose description of local activism driven by Americans who want smaller government and more self-reliance. That sounds like what the Founding Fathers had in mind, does it not?
Bill O'Reilly
#83. [O]ur Founding Fathers enshrined a constitutional separation of powers for the ages undeluded by the fantasy that angels would win elections.
Bruce Fein
#84. Our Founding Fathers drafted the Bill of Rights to ensure that We the People could determine how best to protect our communities.
Mike Quigley
#85. While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Robert Darnton
#86. Plenty of gun opponents have pointed out the obvious: that the Founding Fathers could never have envisioned the kinds of 'arms' that exist today - Washington, Jefferson, and the rest had never even seen a bullet. Musket balls for guns that required constant reloading were the 'arms' of the day.
Kurt Eichenwald
#87. John Adams, by then one of the country's founding fathers, wrote to a friend: I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.
Tom Standage
#88. I rise in support of the separation of powers as established by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution. The Constitution clearly delegates the power to deal with criminal matters, like the use of drugs, to the States.
Dana Rohrabacher
#89. The federal government is far larger than the Founding Fathers ever intended it to be. We have racked up over $16 trillion of debt through wasteful spending, and it is time that we cut that waste and start reducing the size of our government.
Matt Salmon
#90. The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.
Ronald Reagan
#91. I believe that only through a truly educated citizenry can the ideals that inspired the Founding Fathers of our nation be preserved and perpetuated.
David O. McKay
#92. Our children need to assimilate the wonder that is India when they are young, so that they imbibe the principles of our founding fathers and continue to build this great nation.
Shallu Jindal
#93. If the Founding Fathers and other patriots who fought during the Revolutionary War could see the United States today, I believe they would be proud of the path that the thirteen colonies, now fifty strong states, have taken since then.
John Linder
#94. There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things.
Charlie LeDuff
#95. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly.
Hugo Black
#96. We have a tremendous lack of knowledge of how far we have gotten away from the Constitution of the United States. Democrats and Republicans alike have taken us away from the original intent. You see, I believe in this document as our founding fathers intended it.
Paul Broun
#97. Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in - the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill - and yet they neglected to include the right to vote.
Mo Rocca
#98. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren't involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our founding fathers intended and that's certainly isn't what God intended.
Katherine Harris
#99. I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.
James Hillman
#100. There is no doubt where the founding fathers stood on this issue. They believed that people of faith should be permitted to express themselves in public. They believed that this country was big enough and free enough to allow expression of on enormous variety of views and beliefs.
John Cornyn
