Fisher Ames Quotes

29 quotes in 496 categories

• A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.
• Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits . . . it is founded on morals and religion, whose authority reigns in the…
• The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.
• [Why] should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book? Its morals are pure, its examples captivating and noble. The…
• The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.
• Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint…
• We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to…
• The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.
• I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It…
• I consider biennial elections as a security that the sober, second thought of the people shall be law.
• Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills…
• Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.
• [the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.
• The gentleman puts me in mind of an old hen which persists in setting after her eggs are taken away.
• No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of…
• Should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a schoolbook? Its morals are pure, its examples are captivating and noble....In no Book…
• America is rising with a giant's strength. Its bones are yet but cartilages.
• Time never fails to bring every exalted reputation to a strict scrutiny.
• We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We're starting to put more and more textbooks into our schools. We've become…
• I have heard it remarked that men are not to be reasoned out of an opinion they have not reasoned themselves into.

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