James Madison Quotes

No! I stand by the man who works. To hell with kings!

All government is an evil, but, of the two form's of that evil, democracy or monarchy, the sounder is monarchy; the more able to do its will, democracy.

I cannot consent that my mortal body shall be laid in a repository prepared for an Emperor or a King my republican feelings and principles forbid it the simplicity of our system of government forbids it.

Now one of two things is true: Either a republic is a desirable form of government, or else it is not.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

Islam teaches principles of freedom, human dignity, equality, governance by contract, popular sovereignty, and the rule of law that are compatible with but not identical to the cognate principles that belong to the intellectual heritage of liberal democracy

We have been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.

Governments do better without Kings & Nobles than with them.

America should be ... a republic in which every citizen is a sovereign, but in which no one cares or dares to wear a crown.

Pluralism has been the driving fact behind political theory now since the Copernican revolution and the wars of religion that were spawned from it.

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.

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.

The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things...among democratic nations they are two unequal things.

We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.

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.

It is the life of democracy to favor equality.

I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy....liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth.

The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.

I think I will still feel that same appreciation for what [Winston] Churchill and others have said is the worst form of government except all the alternatives.

Democracy is a very bad form of government ... but all the others are so much worse.

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

I think most of [people] are not very well educated themselves to understand the Winston Churchill line - democracy is the worst of all governments until you consider all the other ones.

A democracy is ... accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.