Top 350 James Madison Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.”

— James Madison

302. “The people shall not be restrained from peacefully assembling and consulting for their common good, nor from applying to the legislature by petitions, or remonstrances for redress of their grievances.”

— James Madison

303. “Our opinions agree as to the evil, moral, political, and economical, of slavery.”

— James Madison

304. “How a regulation so unjust in itself, so foreign to the authority of Congress, and so hurtful to the sale of public land, and smelling so strongly of an antiquated bigotry, could have received the countenance of a committee is truly a matter of astonishment.”

— James Madison

305. “All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.”

— James Madison

306. “The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.”

— James Madison

307. “Outlets for the freed blacks are alone wanted for the erasure of the blot from our Republican character.”

— James Madison

308. “Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect.”

— James Madison

309. “As the war was just in its origin and necessary and noble in its objects, we can reflect with a proud satisfaction that in carrying it on no principle of justice or honor, no usage of civilized nations, no precept of courtesy or humanity, have been infringed.”

— James Madison

310. “The American people are too well schooled in the duty and practice of submitting to the will of the majority to permit any serious uneasiness on that account.”

— James Madison

311. “The danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations.”

— James Madison

312. “The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents.”

— James Madison

313. “It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.”

— James Madison

314. “The most that the Convention could do in such a situation, was to avoid the errors suggested by the past experience of other countries, as well as of our own; and to provide a convenient mode of rectifying their own errors, as future experience may unfold them.”

— James Madison

315. “The rights of man as the foundation of just Government had been long understood but the superstructures projected had been sadly defective.”

— James Madison

316. “No distinction seems to be more obvious than that between spiritual and temporal matters. Yet whenever they have been made objects of Legislation, they have clashed and contended with each other, till one or the other has gained the supremacy.”

— James Madison

317. “These considerations and many others that might be mentioned prove, and experience confirms it, that artisans and manufacturers will commonly be disposed to bestow their votes on merchants.”

— James Madison

318. “A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.”

— James Madison

319. “Congress shall never disarm any citizen unless such as are or have been in actual rebellion.”

— James Madison

320. “The number of individuals employed under the Constitution of the United States will be much smaller than the number employed under the particular States.”

— James Madison

321. “It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated.”

— James Madison

322. “Experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly over-rated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful members of the government.”

— James Madison

323. “Of all the objections which have been framed against the federal Constitution, this is perhaps the most extraordinary. Whilst the objection itself is levelled against a pretended oligarchy, the principle of it strikes at the very root of republican government.”

— James Madison

324. “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

— James Madison

325. “The free system of government we have established is so congenial with reason, with common sense, and with a universal feeling, that it must produce approbation and a desire of imitation, as avenues may be found for truth to the knowledge of nations.”

— James Madison

326. “I regret, as much as any member, the unavoidable weight and duration of the burdens to be imposed; having never been a proselyte to the doctrine, that public debts are public benefits. I consider them, on the contrary, as evils which ought to be removed as fast as honor and justice will permit.”

— James Madison

327. “The danger of disturbing the public tranquillity by interesting too strongly the public passions, is a still more serious objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to the decision of the whole society.”

— James Madison

328. “If the public homage of a people can ever be worthy of the favorable regard of the Holy and Omniscient Being to Whom it is addressed, it must be that in which those who join in it are guided only be their free choice-by the impulse of their hearts and the dictates of their consciences...”

— James Madison

329. “Respect for character is always diminished in proportion to the number among whom the blame or praise is to be divided. Conscience, the only remaining tie, is known to be inadequate in individuals: In large numbers, little is to be expected from it.”

— James Madison

330. “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

— James Madison

331. “Testimony of all ages forces us to admit that war is among the most dangerous enemies to liberty, and that the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches of Power.”

— James Madison

332. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”

— James Madison

333. “Americans need not fear the federal government because they enjoy the advantage of being armed, which you possess over the people of almost every other nation.”

— James Madison

334. “Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society. It is an avowed and essential object of the American Union.”

— James Madison

335. “The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”

— James Madison

336. “To consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle.”

— James Madison

337. “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.”

— James Madison

338. “At cheaper and nearer seats of Learning parents with slender incomes may place their sons in a course of education putting them on a level with the sons of the Richest.”

— James Madison

339. “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”

— James Madison

340. “It is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”

— James Madison

341. “I am unable to conceive that the state legislatures which must feel so many motives to watch, and which possess so many means of counteracting the federal legislature, would fail either to detect or to defeat a conspiracy of the latter against the liberties of their common constituencies.”

— James Madison

342. “I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.”

— James Madison

343. “Our First Amendment freedoms give us the right to think what we like and say what we please. And if we the people are to govern ourselves, we must have these rights even if they are misused by a minority.”

— James Madison

344. “Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.”

— James Madison

345. “The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it.”

— James Madison

346. “In all the co-temporary discussions and comments, which the Constitution underwent, it was constantly justified and recommended on the ground, that the powers not given to the government, were withheld from it.”

— James Madison

347. “We look back, already, with astonishment, at the daring outrages committed by despotism, on the reason and rights of man; we look forward with joy, to the period, when it shall be despoiled of all its usurpations, and bound forever in the chains, with which it had loaded its miserable victims.”

— James Madison

348. “Are not the daily devotions conducted by these legal ecclesiastics already degenerating into a scanty attendance, and a tiresome formality?”

— James Madison

349. “No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included.”

— James Madison

350. “I do not conceive that power is given to the President and Senate to dismember the empire, or to alienate any great, essential right. I do not think the whole legislative authority have this power. The exercise of the power must be consistent with the object of the delegation.”

— James Madison