More Quotes from the Founding Fathers
Some quotations from the Founding Fathers that you can read in MAKERS AND TAKERS: How Wealth and Progress are Made and How They are Taken Away or Prevented:
"To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, 'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.'" --Thomas Jefferson
"When we say, that all men are equal; we mean not to apply this equality to their virtues, their talents, their dispositions, or their acquirements. In all these respects, there is, and it is fit for the great purpose of society that there should be, great inequality among men." --James Wilson
"Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our [state] constitutions . . . .None of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy." --Edmund Randolph
"A pure democracy . . . can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction . . . . There is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party . . . . Hence it is that such democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been a short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." --James Madison
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under it leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble opinion, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution." --John Adams