James Madison Quotes

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its effect upwards, supporting free and good government.

We... are not really free if we can't control our own government and its policies. And we will never do that if we remain ignorant.

We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.

Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

We know Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as politicians, but they felt that science was something everyone should have a knowledge of.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Satisfy the public mind that their liberties will be perpetual.

Young people today know little of our history—of freedom and democracy. You cannot support and defend what you do not understand.

It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people

I rejoice in having so favorable an opportunity of felicitating the State of Rhode Island on the co-operation I am sure to find in the measures adopted by the guardians of literature in this place, for improving the morals of the rising generation, and inculcating upon their minds principles peculiarly calculated for the preservation of our rights and liberties. You may rely on whatever protection I may be able to afford in so important an object as the education of our youth.

… schools of liberty …. warehouses of disinterested patriotism

The health of our republic depends on shared principles like the First Amendment, but it is also built on the Teddy Roosevelt-like vigor of its citizens and local self-reliance.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Only an educated and informed people will be a free people.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers.

An educated people can be easily governed.

My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.