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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Abraham Lincoln2 quotes
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. — Abraham Lincoln · 1861If all do not join now to save the good old ship of the Union on this voyage, nobody will have a chance to pilot her on another voyage. — Abraham Lincoln · 1861Benjamin Franklin2 quotes
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency, but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes! — Benjamin Franklin · 1789A republic, if you can keep it. — Benjamin Franklin · 1787George Washington2 quotes
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. — George Washington · 1796The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. — George Washington · 1789James Monroe2 quotes
In our whole system, national and State, we have shunned all the defects which unceasingly preyed on the vitals and destroyed the ancient Republics. — James Monroe · 1821There is every reason to believe that our system will soon attain the highest degree of perfection of which human institutions are capable, and that the movement in all its branches will exhibit such a degree of order and harmony as to command the admiration and respect of the civilized world. — James Monroe · 1821Alexander Hamilton1 quote
Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world! — Alexander Hamilton · 1787Andrew Jackson1 quote
As long as our Government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending. — Andrew Jackson · 1833Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1 quote
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1850Herbert Hoover1 quote
Superficial observers seem to find no destiny for our abounding increase in population, in wealth and power except that of imperialism. They fail to see that the American people are engrossed in the building for themselves of a new economic system, a new social system, a new political system all of which are characterized by aspirations of freedom of opportunity and thereby are the negation of imperialism. — Herbert Hoover · 1929John Adams1 quote
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. — John Adams · 1798John Quincy Adams1 quote
It is a source of gratification and of encouragement to me to observe that the great result of this experiment upon the theory of human rights has at the close of that generation by which it was formed been crowned with success equal to the most sanguine expectations of its founders. — John Quincy Adams · 1825Ronald Reagan1 quote
Our New Beginning is a continuation of that beginning created two centuries ago when, for the first time in history, government, the people said, was not our master, it is our servant; its only power that which we the people allow it to have. — Ronald Reagan · 1985