My Newz 'n Ideas

It is my intent to express my opinion and to discuss current events. Feel free to make suggestions to fields you would like to see covered, and I will consider them. Please leave your name with comments. Thank you. Arabic: عربي.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Daily Quote 5/14/2006

Monday, May 8, 2006.
"[T]here is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it." --George Washington (letter to Robert Morris, 12 April 1786), Reference: Washington's Maxims, 157.

Tuesday, May 9, 2006.
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." --James Madison (speech at the Constitutional Convention, 7/11/1787), Reference: Advice to My Country, Mattern ed. (79); original The Papers of John Madison, Congressional Series, vol. 10 (98)

Wednesday, 5/10/2006.
"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them." -- Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of the Causes and Necessitiesof Taking up Arms, 6 July 1775), Reference: Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, Ford et al., ed., vol. 2 (154)

Thursday, 5/11/2006.
"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account." --Thomas Jefferson (letter to Monsieur A. Coray, 31 October 1823), Reference: respec. Quoted

Friday, 5/12/2006.
"The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. . . . How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers?" --John Adams (Diary, 2 June 1778), Reference: The Works of John Adams, C.F. Adams, ed., vol. 3 (171)

Category: Constitutional Issues.