Founding Ideas Quotes & Sayings

Love is terribly sincere and great. I suppose that is why so many people are afraid of it, and so few can live up to it. - Bliss Carman to Gladys Baldwin, 1915 (age 52) — Jeanette Lynes

China has no choice but to emulate the power of America's founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights. — Patrick Mendis

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate. — Claire McCaskill

Skousen's movement (it changed its name from the Freemen Institute to the National Center for Constitutional Studies after militia groups began to use the "freemen" label) persisted. Skousen, claiming to represent the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, called for the abolition of Social Security, farm subsidies, and education and welfare funding; pulling out of the United Nations; and eliminating federal income taxes and most federal regulatory agencies. Skousen's ideas might have died with him, but all that changed when Beck turned The 5,000 Year Leap into his manifesto. Skousen, — Dana Milbank

We want to be open-minded enough to accept radial new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don't want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out. — Michael Shermer

The reality is that the founding fathers were land speculators. The fact was that you couldn't vote in this country if you did not own land, and that was basically you had to be a white man who owned land. Now how did they get that land? They basically had to steal it from someone, and that would be probably the Indians. And so most of the initial founding fathers were, while they may have had some really nice ideas about democracy, they had a lot of issues with people of color. They had a lot of issues with people who held things that they coveted. — Winona LaDuke

My look is a Modern Bohemian type thing. — Frances Bean Cobain

Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods. — Ron Chernow

As Americans we place special emphasis on human dignity, justice and freedom. WE measure as good of bad that which meets these goals. Those high ideas have survived and flourished on this soil for two centuries since the Founding Fathers planted them because we have sustained a general public enlightenment through a free and universal public school system. — Henry Clausen

Just because I haven't put a lot of thought into this book doesn't mean you shouldn't. I warn you to read this book carefully. Savor my ideas. Memorize the pertinent passages. Eat with it, sleep with it, let nature take its course.
Because what I have dictated is nothing less than a Constitution for the Colbert Nation. And, like our Founding Fathers, I hold my Truths to be self-evident, which is why I did absolutely no research.
I didn't need to. The only research I needed was a long hard look in the mirror. — Stephen Colbert

The Founding Fathers' instructions were clear: The right to free speech includes bad speech; it means tolerance of ideas that many find obnoxious. — David Ignatius

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense. — Sarah Dessen

First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn't the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team. — James C. Collins

There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle. — David Quammen

The idea of separating church and state by the Founding Fathers of America was freedom from the domination of one form of religion, because many of them left England, because they were persecuted by the church, because they want to express their Christian faith in a different way. So it was a bit of warfare between Christians. — John Lennox

This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it's the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents. — Charles P. Pierce

The American people want to pay attention to serious ideas again. Our founding was built by people who were political philosophers, and we need to get back to that, away from this kind of cheap political rhetoric of Right and Left. — Dave Brat

The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?) — Tina Packer

The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the first the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind
men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh
who founded the English colonies in America. — J. F. C. Fuller

I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body. — Thomas Szasz

Our purpose in founding our state was not to promote the happiness of a single class, but, so far as possible, of the whole community. Our idea was that we were most likely to justice in such a community, and so be able to decide the question we are trying to answer. We are therefore at the moment trying to construct what we think is a happy community by securing the happiness not of a select minority, but of a whole. — Plato

It is through many lifetimes of shifting the aggregate of the self that one finally reaches a point of maximum velocity whereby one can snap off the circle completely and move into freedom. — Frederick Lenz

Today the separation of church and state is America is used to silence the church ... The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent ... It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas ... To have suggested the state separated from religion and religious influence would have amazed the Founding Fathers. — Francis Schaeffer

Civically engaged, business oriented, technology obsessed, and socially skilled, Franklin was "our founding Yuppie," declares the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Franklin "would have felt right at home in the information revolution," Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of the statesman. "We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan of a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas." The essence of Franklin's appeal is that he was brilliant but practical, interested in everything, but especially in how things work. — Fareed Zakaria

The spread of democracy is a wonderful thing-it is a necessary foundation for peace-and it can happen. But it cannot be advanced by force, and still less by the creation of a new empire, an idea that is as unworkable as it morally mistaken. Empire, the embodiment of force, violates equity on a global scale. No lover of freedom can give it support. It is especially contrary to the founding principles of the United States. — Jonathan Schell

Firstly, economic globalisation has brought prosperity and development to many countries, but also financial crises to Asia, Latin America and Russia, and increasing poverty and marginalisation. — Anna Lindh

America has not been a story or a byword. That small community of Pilgrims prospered and, driven by the dreams and, yes, by the ideas of the Founding Fathers, went on to become a beacon to all the oppressed and poor of the world. — Ronald Reagan

And it had come from God, she was certain, for He answered most of her prayers that way. Unobtrusively. Quietly. — Lawana Blackwell

At the heel end of the day, I need my glass of wine. Christmas lights for the brain. — Bill Callahan

A liar, a thief, and utterly without conscience. But he'll keep to any deal you strike with him. — Leigh Bardugo

The pursuit of science, the study of the great works, the value of free inquiry, in short, the very idea of living the life of the mind - yes, these formative and abiding principles of higher education in America had their first and firmest advocate, and their greatest embodiment, in a tall, fair-headed, friendly man who watched this university take form from the mountainside where he lived, the university whose founding he called a crowning achievement to along and well-spent life. — Ronald Reagan

The target is the objective to be reached. It was chosen by the archer and though it is a long way off, we cannot blame it when we fail to hit it. In this lies the beauty of the way of the bow: you can never excuse yourself by saying that your opponent was stronger than you. You were the one who chose the target and you are responsible for it. — Paulo Coelho