Last Updated on 22 June 2024

Quotes from James Madison (1751-1836)

• The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
• The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
• Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
• The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.
• Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.
• Equal laws protecting equal rights…the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country.
• History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it’s issuance.
• I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.
• I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
• If man is not fit to govern himself, how can he be fit to govern someone else?
• If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within.
• If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
• It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
• 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.
• Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
• Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind, which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
• No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
• Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.
• A president is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.
• The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.
• Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise…. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
• There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by…corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.
• The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
• Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.