10 Founding Fathers Quotes That Will Make Conservatives’ Heads Explode

Conservatives insist their cruel and unworkable agenda is sanctioned by America’s Founding Fathers. As with their similar claims about Jesus Christ wanting America to oppress the poor and help the wealthy, these claims are blatantly false. The following 10 quotes prove this.

The Founding Fathers on regulating corporations.

1. “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

– Thomas Jefferson, 1802 letter to Secretary of State Albert Gallatin.

2. “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

– Thomas Jefferson.

3. “The power of all corporations ought to be limited, [...] the growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”

– James Madison

The Founding Fathers on war.

4. “He who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.”

– Thomas Paine: The Crisis No. V, 1797

5. “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” -Thomas Jefferson

The Founding Fathers on liberalism.

6. “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.” — George Washington

The Founding Fathers on religion.

7. “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

~1797 Treaty of Tripoli signed by Founding Father John Adams

8. “We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition… In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man’s religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States.”

~Founding Father George Washington, letter to the members of the New Church in Baltimore, January 27, 1793

9. “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

~Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Horatio Spofford, 1814

The Founding Fathers on taxes.

10. “As to Taxes, they are evidently inseparable from Government. It is impossible without them to pay the debts of the nation, to protect it from foreign danger, or to secure individuals from lawless violence and rapine.” –~ Alexander Hamilton: Address to the Electors of the State of New York, March, 1801

America’s First President Was The Tea Party’s Worst Nightmare

Five years after General George Washington took command of a revolutionary army, he believed that the revolution was on the verge of collapse.

The Articles of Confederation, which bound the thirteen former British colonies together prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, were fundamentally flawed. Congress, under the Articles, could not directly tax individuals or legislate their actions. Delegates to Congress had little authority to exercise independent judgment, as they both owed their salaries to their state government and could be recalled “at any time.” Of particular frustration to General Washington, the Articles also gave Congress no real power to raise troops or to provide for them once they were assembled under Washington’s command. Congress could request recruits or money, but it was powerless if the states denied these requests.

“Unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone,” Washington wrote in 1780, “unless they are vested with powers by the several States competent to the purposes of war . . . our Cause is lost.”

The Revolutionary War taught our first president the value of a strong central government. And this understanding was not limited simply to the need to provide a capable army. As Washington wrote a young former aide named Alexander Hamilton shortly after the war was won, “unless Congress have powers competent to all general purposes,  the distresses we have encountered, the expences we have incurred, and the blood we have spilt in the course of an eight years’ war, will avail us nothing.”

Virginia Marriage Equality Decision Exposes Religious Right’s Hatred of America

We predicted it yesterday: Religious Right leaders would say in response to the Virginia marriage equality ruling that more rights somehow equals fewer rights, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) did not disappoint. It was Valentine’s Day so Perkins sent his love to Judge Arena L. Wright Allen, calling her, among other things, “arrogant” and an “activist judge” (that’s what Jesus said to do to your enemies, right? Lay some hate on ‘em?):

It appears that we have yet another example of an arrogant judge substituting her personal preferences for the judgment of the General Assembly and 57 percent of Virginia voters. Our nation’s judicial system has been infected by activist judges, which threaten the stability of our nation and the rule of law.

Actually, Judge Wright Allen substituted the Constitution for the judgment of 57 percent of Virginia voters. The Founding Fathers feared this – the tyranny of the majority – and wrote the Constitution to account for such “excesses of democracy” as they were called. As they knew – and as Judge Wright Allen knows, a majority doesn’t trump the law of the land, but they can trump right and wrong if the law does not protect the interests of the minority as well as the majority.

In the words of James Madison:

The lesson we are to draw from the whole is, that where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure. In a republican government, the majority, if united, have always an opportunity. The only remedy is, to enlarge the sphere, and thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties, that, in the first place, a majority will not be likely, at the same moment, to have a common interest separate from that of the whole, or of the minority; and in the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, they may not be so apt to unite in the pursuit of it. It was incumbent on us, then, to try this remedy, and, with that view, to frame a republican system on such a scale, and in such a form, as will control all the evils which have been experienced.