"In my public life I aspire to be naught but a figurehead, for the One Who made us, for self-evident truth, for principle, for right, for We the People, for Posterity, to be the truest representation of the foregoing I can be, in the land of the free, the home of the republican, constitutional form of representative self-government that our forebears sacrificed, and bled, and in some cases died, to give us."
-- Tom Hoefling, March 29, 2013
"It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the Virginia Query 19, 1781
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
"Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man."
-- Thomas Jefferson
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"Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing."
"I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary."
-- Ronald Reagan
"If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, 1816
"There is no good government but what is republican...a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men'...a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics."
-- John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
--George Washington, First Inaugural Address, 1789
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