"It is by a simple rule I have studied the Constitution, which rule is, that no human being, no race, should be kept down in their efforts to rise to a higher state of liberty and happiness; if any such would rise, I say to them in God's name good-speed."—Seward.
"Why may not illicit combinations for purposes of violence be formed as well by a majority of a state as by a majority of a country or a district of the same state?"—Madison.
"The Federalists of our time look to a single and splendid government, founded on banking institutions and moneyed corporations, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry."—Jefferson.
"Civil broils arise among them when it happens for one great bone to be seized on by some leading dog, who either divides it among the few, and then it falls to an oligarchy, or keeps it to himself, and then it runs up to a tyranny."—Swift.
"It is not to be denied that we live in the midst of strong agitations, and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to our institutions of government. The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the West, the North, the stormy South, all combine to throw the whole ocean into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies, and to disclose its profoundest depths."—Webster.
"In proportion as governments rest on public opinion that opinion must be enlightened."—Washington.
"The result of the whole is, that we must refer to the monitory reflection that no government of human device and human administration can be perfect; that that which is the least imperfect is therefore the best government; that the abuses of all other governments have led to the preference of republican government as the best of all governments, because the least imperfect; that the vital principle of republican government is the lex majoris partis, the will of the majority; that if the will of a majority cannot be trusted where there are diversified and conflicting interests, it can be trusted nowhere, because such interests exist everywhere; that if the manufacturing and agricultural interests be of all interests the most conflicting in the most important operations of government, and a majority government over them be the most intolerable of all governments, it must be as intolerable within the States as it is represented to be in the United States; and, finally, that the advocates of the doctrine, to be consistent, must reject it in the former as well as in the latter, and seek a refuge under an authority master of both."—Madison.
