Founding Era Quotes

The Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact created them as States.

These days we think our politics are nasty and partisan. But our discourse looks like a Platonic symposium compared with the vicious fighting that marked the early Republic.

This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.

The presidency made John Adams an old man long before there was television. As early as the nation's first contested presidential election, with Adams and Jefferson running to succeed Washington, you had a brutal, ugly, vicious campaign that was divisive and as partisan as anything we're experiencing today.

Partly because his life ended before the age of 50, Hamilton was defined by the other founding fathers, and he managed, with amazing consistency, to alienate most of them.

Those men who laid the foundation of this American government and signed he Declaration of Independence were the best spirits the God of heaven could find on the face of the earth. They were choice spirits . . . noble spirits before God.

The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun.

America itself has been through so many challenges since that fateful day back in 1776. Our culture has been a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-go-to-work culture.

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

It took us in this country 11 years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution.

It’s hard for the young to live in uncertainty…. Our founders lived in great uncertainty.

Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.

Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments.

As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity, on both counts.

From the Founding Era onward, there was strong consensus about the centrality of religious liberty in the United States.

Today's widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do only in the privacy of their homes or churches would have been unimaginable to the founders of the republic - even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith.

America's veterans embody the ideals upon which America was founded more than 229 years ago.

In the founding era of our country, it was not organized religion but personal faith that brought focus and unified the early leadership-maybe an unspoken faith in God, and certain values that came with that faith. So in that sense, we cannot discount, in my judgment, religious faith in politics.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom & Father of the University of Virginia

I think that he was responsible for putting the flesh and bones on the Constitution.

The Founding Fathers gave birth to a new type of nation.