JAMES MADISON

I can say conscientiously that I do not know in the world a man of purer integrity, more dispassionate, disinterested, and devoted to genuine Republicanism; nor could I in the whole scope of America and Europe point out an abler head.

Our laws to be wholesome need not be enacted in a palace.

Pardon me if I add that I think him [President James Madison] a little too much of a book politician, and too timid in his politics, for prudence and caution are opposites of timidity.

This message, in point of obscurity, comes nearer my ideas of a Delphic oracle than any state paper which has come under my inspection. It is so cautiously expressed that every man puts what construction on it he pleases.

Great as is the popularity of the President [Madison], it is barely able to resist the torrent of public opinion against the Secretary of War, who, so far as I can judge, is universally considered by the people of this country as incompetent ...

Madison, the President is a plain and rather mean-looking little man, of great simplicity of manners, and an inveterate enemy to form and ceremony so much so that I was officially informed that my introduction with him was to be considered nothing more than the reception of one gentleman by another, and that no particular dress was to be worn on the occasion.

He [Marquis de Lafayette] has a canine appetite for popularity and fame.

I have felt so much for you that I cannot withhold the expression of my sympathies …. All you can do is to order,—that execution must depend on others

His Littleness

I assume that you would not desire your wife the role of partisan.

Tell Dr. Madison that we are now willing to submit to his Philadelphia lawyer for head of the Treasury. The public patient is so very sick that we must swallow anything, however nauseous.

If a simple King of England, by his corrupt servants, chastised New England with whips, the [Madison] administration chastened her with scorpions.

Mr. James Madison is a character who has long been in public life; and what is very remarkable every Person seems to acknowledge his greatness. He blends together the profound politician, with the Scholar. In the management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention, and tho' he cannot be called an Orator, he is a most agreeable, eloquent, and convincing Speaker. From a spirit of industry and application which he possesses in a most eminent degree, he always comes forward the best informed Man of any point in debate. The affairs of the United States, he perhaps, has the most correct knowledge of, of any Man in the Union.

I have paid $120 for the freedom of Paul Jennings; he agrees to work out the same at $8 per month, to be furnished with board, clothes, washing.

James Madison was pessimistic about the country when he could not get accepted his proposal to allow the Congress to veto state laws.

Jefferson, Madison and Washington could not survive in today’s political environment.

We in America are obsessed with elections. Elections are a waste of time. Unless you have a cohort of political leadership as with a Washington, Madison and Jefferson, what is the point of having an election? So some fool will get elected and be nominally in charge and is not really leading a cohort. There is no sense of political coherence among the elite about what the state is going to be.

I do not suspect that Jefferson or Madison ever envisioned Congress honoring the 2,560th anniversary of the birth of Confucius or supporting the designation of National Pi Day.

Our President [James Madison], though a man of amiable manners and great talents, has not I fear those commanding talents, which are necessary to control those about him.

The author of our constitution, James Madison, … would be aghast

The idea that an overweening federal government is a threat to both freedom and equality (not to mention prosperity) goes back to Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry and some other fairly respectable personages. You can disagree with them, or with Coolidge or Reagan or Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or George Will, but to dismiss them as nothing more than mouthpieces of the wealthy and big business is to indulge in [a] sort of anti-intellectualism…

James Madison foresaw our current condition, in which laws are “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood,” and “undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.” Hence, Madison’s paradox: The multiplication of laws undermines the rule of law. “Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

Religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any one who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both ... And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.

I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together

The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

The definition of the right of suffrage is very justly regarded as a fundamental article of republican government.

[We must] teach the advocates for an open trade the folly as well as degradation of their policy.

T]he prevailing opinion in Europe, England not excepted, has been that religion could not be preserved without the support of government nor government be supported without an established religion that there must be at least an alliance of some sort between them. It remained for North America to bring the great and interesting subject to a fair, and finally a decisive test