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"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
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"Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us."
"I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world."
"For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision."
"Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles."
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
"For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery."
"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."
"Government is a ruling structured thuggery."
"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 exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
Explore more quotes by James Madison
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
"What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
"War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason."
"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
"The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
"A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both."
"The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."
"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."
"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."
"Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes."
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