"Should I keep back my opinion at this time I should consider myself guilty of treason toward my country and treason toward the majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthy Kings"  -- "The Christian Philosophy of Patrick Henry" 

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." -- John Adams  

"You can vote your way into socialism, but you will have to shoot your way out.”  --Rights vs. Privileges (Allen West)

"Freedom & Liberty are not hereditary: "It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty" --   John Dickinson

"Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them." --Jedediah Morse

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” -- Thomas Jefferson  

"The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it." -- Elmer Davis   

"The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects ...Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." -- James Madison, Primary Author of the U.S. Constitution, to Congress, 1794.

"On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." -- Thomas Jefferson

“The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.” — James Wilson (1790)

Warnings Against Tyranny - "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison  

"Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them." --Jedediah Morse   

“The Constitution ... is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” —Thomas Jefferson (1819)

H.W. Prentiss created an outline for nations that described a progression "from bondage to spiritual faith, to courage, to liberty, to abundance, to selfishness, to complacency, to apathy, to dependence, back to bondage."   

"A compromise which results in a haf-step toward evil is all wrong..." --Theodore Roosevelt