Andrew Jackson Quotes

We are teaching the world the great truth that Governments do better without Kings & Nobles than with them.

Sir, I am a republican; and I desire to see this House observe the principles of that democracy which is ever on the lips of its members, and which, I hope, is in their hearts, as I know and feel it is in mine, and mean it shall be in my conduct.

I was called upon to fulfill the republican dreams of my forefathers.

The republican is not the man of eternity, he is the man of time; his paradise is this earth, he wants to enjoy freedom and happiness there, and to enjoy them while he is there, without waiting ...

I know there are some among us who would now establish a monarchy. But they are inconsiderable in number and weight of character. The rising race are all republicans. We were educated in royalism: no wonder if some of us retain that idolatry still. Our young people are educated in republicanism. An apostasy from that to royalism is unprecedented and impossible.

We want to overthrow the imperial power not because it is Manchurian but because we want republicanism... We republican revolutionaries can never have the notion of becoming emperors after the revolution, like all the peasant rebels did in the past.

Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.

I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.

Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.

George Washington might have become our king, but chose not to. His governing idea was that government is our servant because we are inherently free. It is an idea too many in government today forget.

Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive.

Let the Democrates go on making its case for more government control over every aspect of our lives. More taxes to pay. More debt to carry. More rules to follow. More judges who just make it up as they go along. We Republicans, we are committed to a federal government that acts again as a servant accountable to the people, following the constitution, and venturing not one inch beyond the consent of the governed. We, we in this party, offer a better way for our country based on fundamentals that go back to the founding generation.

Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism.

If India is computer, Congress is its default program.

The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.

I'm a patriot, and I think democracy is the best system available. It's very flawed, but it works better than anything else.

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.

[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.

I hunted far enough to suspect that the Fathers of the Republic who wrote our Sacred Constitution of the United States not only did not, but did not want to, establish a democratic government.

America has never been a pure democracy and majoritarianism has always been as much feared as monarchism.

First there is the democratic idea: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights; that these rights are alienable only by the possessor thereof; that they are equal in men; that government is to organize these natural, unalienable and equal rights into institutions designed for the good of the governed, and therefore government is to be of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. Here government is development, not exploitation.

In Democracy, man exploits man; in Communism, it's the other way round.

The less luxury there is in a republic, the more it is perfect.

"Government," says Swift, "is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads."