James Madison Quotes

What has the North to do with slavery? What have we to do with it, indeed! when it encircles us like the air we breathe -- as invisible but as ever near us -- when it makes our laws, controls our interests, appoints our rulers, sets a price upon our heads, demands the sacrifice of our free utterance, disfranchises in one half the States the citizens when the Constitution has made free every where--when it makes Religion its pander, and the Church its sanctuary!

Home is where my dignity lives, not necessarily where my ancestors put down roots.

I have declined to move any such colony to any State [country] without first obtaining the consent of the government, with an agreement on its part to receive and protect such emigrants in all the rights of freemen…. Liberia and Haiti are as yet the only countries to which colonies of African descent from here could go with certainty of being received and adopted as citizens; and I regret to say such persons contemplating colonization do not seem so willing to go to those countries

No black or mulatto person shall be permitted to settle or reside in this state, unless he or she shall first produce a fair certificate from some court within the United States, of his or her actual freedom.

A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in ... and how many want out.

We were stolen from our mother country and brought here. We have tilled the ground and made fortunes for thousands, and still they are not weary of our services. _But they who stay to till the ground must be slaves_. Is there not land enough in America, or 'corn enough in Egypt'? Why should they send us into a far country to die? See the thousands of foreigners emigrating to America every year: and if there be ground sufficient for them to cultivate, and bread for them to eat, why would they wish to send the ‘first tillers’ of the land away? Africans have made fortunes for thousands, who are yet unwilling to part with their services; but the free must be sent away, and those who remain must be slaves. I have no doubt that there are many good men who do not see as I do, and who are sending us to Liberia; but they have not duly considered the subject--they are not men of color. This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our ‘mother country’, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free.

The land of unlimited opportunity was for me, for a long time, impossible to reach. The wall, barbed wire and the order to shoot at those who tried to leave limited my access to the free world.

To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against the liberty of conscience, which is one of the foundations of American life.

The ultimate test of a society's freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it's how it treats its dissidents.

The conservatives have already accepted a large part of the collectivist creed-a creed that has governed policy for so long that many of its institutions have come to be accepted as a matter of course and have become a source of pride to "conservative" parties who created them. Here the believer in freedom cannot but conflict with the conservative and take an essentially radical position, directed against popular prejudices, entrenched positions, and firmly established privileges. Follies and abuses are no better for having long been established principles of folly.

I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land.

In 1790, the nation which had fought a revolution against taxation without representation discovered that some of its citizens weren't much happier about taxation with representation.

Democracy is "government of, by and for the people".

There is no kingdom like the forests.

PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb. The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone.

Our attachment to no nation on earth should supplant our attachment to liberty.

The great thing about America is everybody should vote.

Freedom was taken away from my family until we landed in America and it was given back to us.

Donald Trump proposes to deport 16 million people, 11 million who are here without documents. And both Donald Trump and Mike Pence want to get rid of birthright citizenship. So if you're born here, but your parents don't have documents, they want to eliminate that. That's another 4.5 million people.

The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody's church.

To blend, without coercion, the individual good and the common good is the essence of citizenship in a free country.

That's why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors - found the courage to keep it alive.

Be wise; let prudence dictate all your counsels; preserve peace with all men, if possible; stand by the Constitution of your country; observe its principles; and above all, show yourselves men of God, worthy citizens.