Mondays Start

Here are some interesting quotes from a book I just finished a week or 2 ago. I am re-reading some of what I highlighted the first go.

I think it should be required reading for every high school student in America.

I was blessed to go to a high school in VA before the "LIBs" changed the history books, to look like they believe history should have been, Not what it was.

Early American history was very important, I think because so much of it happened locally. NY PA VA... In high School I went on field trips to PA,NY and VA all pertaining to the writing of the Constitution and the Building of America.

All of my sisters went to High school in CA. The early American history they learned was considerably different than mine. What they learned of the Constitution they learned in grade school or after they got out of High School.
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Thomas Jefferson

"Public debt [is] the greatest of the dangers to be feared.
We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves."

"May you and your contemporaries preserve inviolate the Constitution, which, cherished in all its chastity and purity, will prove in the end a blessing to all the nations of the earth."

"If a monarchist be in office, anywhere, and it be known to the President, the oath he has taken to support the Constitution imperiously requires the instantaneous dismission of such officer."

"The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to [perform best]."

"The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations."

Benjamin Franklin

"The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes, the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans, and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure.

"Whenever an office, through the increase of fees or otherwise, becomes so profitable, as to occasion many to apply for it, the profits ought to be lessened by the legislature."

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt an vicious, they have more need of masters."

James Madison

"It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it [the Constitution] a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution."

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood."

Alexander Hamilton

"The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority."

"Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed….It would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself."

John Adams

"I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people."

Samuel Adams

"The Utopian schemes of leveling [re-distribution of the wealth] and a community of goods [central ownership of the means of production and distribution], as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the Crown."

5000 Year Leap
A really good, easy to read, explanation of several of the Federalist Papers, and the ideas leading to our Constitution.