Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.
Fisher Ames
Democracy, in its best state, ...
Quotes from the same author
We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We're starting to put more and more textbooks into our schools. We've become accustomed of late of putting little books into the hands of children, containing fables and moral lessons. We're spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools. The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other man-made book.
Fisher Ames
[the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.
Fisher Ames
Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.
Fisher Ames
We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press...It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.
Fisher Ames
A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices, and ambitions of their leaders is a democracy.
Fisher Ames
