"People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents."

-Andrew Carnegie

"These are times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon it's goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated." 

-Thomas Paine

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."

-Daniel Webster 

"It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions." -Samuel Adams  

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."

-Thomas Jefferson

"But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, envinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and provide new guards for their future security."

- Declaration of Independence  

"It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own"

-James Otis 

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

-John F. Kennedy

"The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution."

-John Adams 

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence."

-Abigail Adams 

"Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error."

- Benjamin Rush 

"Presumption should never make us neglect that which appears easy to us, nor despair make us lose courage at the sight of difficulties."

-Benjamin Banneker  

"Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."

-William Jennings Bryan

"Give [judges] the powers and the independence now contended for and... your government becomes a despotism and they become your rulers. They are to decide upon the lives, the liberties, and the property of your citizens; they have an absolute veto upon your laws by declaring them null and void at pleasure; they are to introduce at will the laws of foreign country... after being clothed with this arbitrary power, they are beyond the control of the nation. ... If all this be true - if this doctrine be established in the extent which is now contended for - the Constitution is not worth the time we are now spending on it. It is - as it has been called by it's enemies - mere parchment. For these judges, thus rendered omnipotent, may overleap the Constitution and trample on your laws."

-Joseph Nicholson
 early member of Congress

"[W]hat innumerable acts of injustice may be committed - and how fatally may the principles of liberty be sapped - by a succession of judges utterly independent of the people?"

-John Dickinson  

"You must remember that some things legally right are not morally right"

-Abraham Lincoln 

"The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best Book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the only Book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity."

-Noah Webster

"The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity"

-Henry Clay  

"The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous." 

- Frederick Douglass

" I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent."

-Ulysses S. Grant