Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

America's veterans embody the ideals upon which America was founded more than 229 years ago.

People have lost what this nation was built on. I think our core values have been set aside... I believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.

May those principles, which were so honorably and nobly defended, namely, the Constitution of our land, by our fathers, be established forever.

I do believe, in the long term, we will either get back to the principles that built America or we lose this country. And I'm an optimist.

I believe in the principles that built America, I believe in the Constitution.

America has never forgotten - and never will forget - the nobler things that brought her into being and that light her path - the path that was entered upon only one hundred and fifty years ago ... How young she is! It will be centuries before she will adopt that maturity of custom - the clothing of the grave - that some people believe she is already fitted for.

The Founding Fathers and our fathers are rolling over in their graves as this great country voluntarily abandons its dreams of equal opportunity, achievement and prosperity and sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Americans - not just starting thirty years ago but going back to the beginning, when we were rebelling against King George - we've always been of two minds about the government, which is why the framers wrote the Constitution the way they did.

America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.

It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.

The founders of the Republic dealt with things as they were presented to them, in a spirit of self sacrificing Patriotism and as time has proved, with a comprehensive wisdom which it will always be safe for us to consult

It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community.

People don't even recognize who the Founding Fathers of the United States were. They were exceptional human beings - when you signed the Declaration of Independence, that was a death warrant they signed their name to. You have to have courage to put your name on a death warrant against the most powerful nation in the world at that time. And yet, we didn't honor who they really were. They were deists. They lived an enlightened belief system.

... the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.

Our country was founded on a distrust of government. Our founding fathers gave power to the people to keep an eye on government. So when politicians say, 'Trust me,' they're actually being very un-American.

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

I've said many times - I told William Buckley, I said, "You warped my mind and I never recovered from it." That was a principled, lawful understanding of the role of government, the Constitution. It was not based on racism, on demagoguery, but on strong principles that - which, consistent with the American heritage and our strength for the future.

Americanism consists in utterly believing in the principles of America.

America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.

The bottom line is that we've become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was horrified when Congress appropriated $15,000 to help French refugees. He said, '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.' Tragically, today's Americans would run Madison out of town on a rail.

In the months ahead, I will leave the Department of Justice, but I will never -- I will never -- leave the work. I will continue to serve and try to find ways to make our nation even more true to its founding ideals.

More than any other figure in our history [Tomas] Jefferson is responsible for the idea of American exceptionalism.

Yes here's to the founding fathers - slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes.