Stephen Ambrose Quotes

The USA [is] the only society to be born both ‘modern’ and ‘democratic’.

The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.

The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.

The Founding Fathers gave birth to a new type of nation.

This is a time for a national conversation. A conversation about the document that binds us as a nation and a people. That document, of course, is the Constitution.

In 1987, the United States celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of the constitutional convention that provided the basic rules for the American political order. This convention was one of the very few historical examples in which political rules were deliberately chosen.

The Constitution lies at the core of our civil religion.

The founding fathers set up this country as a republic—not a democracy.

We’ve come pretty far on this old, rickety, 18th century, political system, and I for one like it.

As for us BRITONS, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of A PUBLIC and A CONSTITUTION; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d.

The United States is a constitutional republic, and the Founding Fathers fought to ensure that the mob couldn't undermine it.

The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law - that form of government is usually temporary.

Some have argued that the United States was designed to block majority rule; to be a 'republic, not a democracy.' This is ahistorical nonsense.

Elected representatives are so embedded in the basic notion of what constitutes a democratic nation that it has become indistinguishable from any other form of democratic governance.

Except for the Bible, the two greatest documents ever written are the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

In comparison with other men of their time, the Americans were distinguished by the possession of new political and social ideas, which were destined to be the foundation of the American commonwealth.

Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it.

Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy.

Government is necessary for our survival. We need government in order to survive. The Founding Fathers created a special place for government. It is called the Constitution.

Two hundred years ago, our Founding Fathers gave us a democracy. It was based upon the simple, yet noble, idea that government derives its validity from the consent of the governed.

American exceptionalism is grounded in the founding of the United States upon an idea, rather than upon the ambitions of men.

The United States form a young republic, a confederacy which ought ever to be cemented by a union of interests and affection, under the influence of those principles which obtained their independence.

The Founding Fathers gladly sacrificed government that could provide speedy, effective, cohesive, and internally consistent policies. They opted for one that had a maximum number of veto points and checks and balances and protections against tyranny by particular officials or tyranny by selfish majorities.

The United States is dangerously close to becoming a democracy instead of a republic.

The United States of America