James Madison Quotes

It's a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

Hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy.

The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.

God has opened many doors of opportunity throughout my lifetime, but I believe the greatest of those doors was allowing me to be born in the United States of America.

Democracy shows not only its power in reforming governments, but in regenerating a race of men and this is the greatest blessing of free governments.

The closer Iraq approaches freedom and democracy, the more impediments and barriers the terrorists will erect.

I now proceed to demonstrate that the Mexicans are wholly incapable of self-government, and that our liberties, our fortunes and our lives are insecure so long as we are connected with them.

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perennially rejuvenated illusions.

As soon as control eases, there is chaos. [Yi fang, jiu luan.]

Democracies are at least contemporarily fickle and heartless.

I came prepared to treat with a regular government and have had to do with a mob and mob leaders.

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions. It’s the First Law of Petropolitics.

It is overly optimistic to think that we can take a country that has emerged from under a totalitarian regime with its institutions of civil society and create a beacon of democracy within five years. If we try to transform Iraq into a democracy, we will need more and more troops over time because we will have to quell nationalistic revolts.

The U.S. military will be stepping into a morass. Iraq presents as unpromising a breeding ground for democracy as any in the world. It has never really known democracy or even legitimate, centralized rule for any great duration.

For my part, I esteem liberty so valuable a blessing in society, that whatever favor, its progress and security can scares be too fondly cherished by every one who is a lover of human kind

We wish to avoid at all costs the recurrent experience in some democratic countries where the people give the governments the opposition

Liberty is not wanting in popular (democratic) states; nay, they have rather too much of it, since it degenerates into licentiousness. Hence it is that they are ever tottering and weak. Intestine commotions, or foreign attacks, often throw them into consternation.

Popular elections by country rustics and intriguing city-dwellers are one more obstacle to the practice of federation among us; because the former are so ignorant that they cast their votes mechanically, and the latter so ambitious that they convert everything into factions; therefore in Venezuela there has never been a free and just vote

I worry that a democratic transition in this period for a state like the U.a. E. would put, us in the throes of reactionary conservatism, probably for the next 30 or 40 years. I look at what is happening in Egypt and other places, and I wonder, do I need that kind of transition?

War and democracy have never been happy bedfellows…. War has always threatened democracy.

Gadhafi opponents included many 'good guys,' but they never received the support necessary to govern a new Libya after he was gone.

Growing terrorism, permissive societies, democracy collapsing through lack of law and order. If things continue on their present track, the disintegration of Western societies will occur much sooner than you think under the hammer blows of fascism and communism. Freedom is not something that does not have a breaking point, and your enemies would like you to reach that point.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.