Americans on America

"Freedom , not safety , is the highest good."

"[O]vergrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

- George Washington Washington's Farewell Address, 1796





"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master."
- George Washington




"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."

"I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind."

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape."

"Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us."

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

"Question even the existence of a God; if there be one, he must approve of the homage of reason over that of blind-folded fear."
- Thomas Jefferson




"All men having power ought to be mistrusted."

"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

"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."

"Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."

"The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war."

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
- James Madison




"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin




"They may introduce the practice of France, Spain, and Germany--of torturing, to extort a confession of the crime. They will say that they might as well draw examples from those countries as from Great Britain, and they will tell you that there is such a necessity of strengthening the arm of government, that they must have a criminal equity, and extort confession by torture, in order to punish with still more relentless severity. We are then lost and undone ..."
- Thomas Paine, Debate in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788