Confederation Quotes

Canada is divided by great mountains, great prairies, Great Lakes, and eleven governments that really grate.

Until 1847 Switzerland remained a pure Confederation of States, that is to say, she took five and a half centuries to make the step which the United States achieved at once.

We are not a nation, but a union, a confederacy of equal and sovereign states.

This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

The democratic element has a fortunate effect in the political sphere when it is balanced by another force. We have this advantage over our neighbors, the Americans, who have extreme democracy.

Canada acceding to this confederation, and joining in the measures of the united states, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this union: but no other colony shall be admitted into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine states.

Join or Die

The union of so many states will be seen in the eyes of the world—a wonder.

I fear a permanent Confederation will never be settled; tho the most material articles are I think got thro', so as to give great offence to some, but to my Satisfaction.

The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric.

Slavery existed before the formation of this Union. It derived from the Constitution that recognition which it would not have enjoyed without the confederation. If the States had not united together, there would have been no obligation on adjoining States to regard any species of property unknown to themselves.

Self-determination could mean independence, confederacy, federal and autonomy.

If Yugoslavia is to exist, it can exist only as an alliance, a confederation of independent states.

I have the highest veneration of those Gentleman, -- but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of the confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one of great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.

The clan is nothing more than a larger family, with its patriarchal chief as the natural head, and the union of several clans by intermarriage and voluntary connection constitutes the tribe.

As in forming a political society, each individual contributes some of his rights, in order that he may, from a common stock of rights, derive greater benefits, than he could from merely his own; so, in forming a confederation, each political society should contribute such a share of their rights, as will, from a common stock of these rights, produce the largest quantity of benefits for them.

When the blood of our citizens, shed by a British soldiery, had stained our streets, and flowed upon the heights which surround us, and sunk into the earth upon the plains of Lexington and Concord, then when he, whose name can never be pronounced by American lips without the strongest emotion of gratitude and love to every American heart--when he, that slaveholder, who from this canvass smiles upon you, his children, with paternal benignity, came with other slaveholders to drive the British myrmidons from this city, and in this hall, our fathers did not refuse to hold communion with them. "With slaveholders they formed the Confederation, neither asking nor receiving any right to interfere in their domestic relations; with them they made the Declaration of Independence

When any one state in the American union refuses obedience to the Confederation, by which they have bound themselves, the rest have a natural right to compel them to obedience.

In 1787, many Americans were convinced that the 'perpetual union' they had created in winning independence was collapsing. Six years earlier, in the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen state governments had surrendered extensive powers to a congress of delegates from each state legislature.

Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North or South, is to be peopled … speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws.

Canada is seen to some as a confederation of shopping centres.

This setting of State laws above the guarantees of the National Constitution is one of the forms of 'State Rights' which has already wrought so much evil to the country. Unless the United States is held as superior to States, we have no nation; we are merely a confederation of States…

It can no more negotiate sovereignty-association then it can negotiate sour sugar, dry water, boiling ice, or stationary motion.

Confederation is a compact, made originally by four provinces but adhered to by all the nine provinces who have entered it, and I submit to the judgment of this house and to the best consideration of its members, that this compact should not be lightly altered.

The Government made by a number of Sovereign States.