“Now more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. . .[I]f the next centennial does not find us a great nation. . .it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.”

– James A. Garfield

“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. . . We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”  

– Martin Luther King Jr.

“I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

– George Mason

*The Minute Man statue in Concord, Massachusetts (source)

“Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

*Picture source

“You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen.”

– John Adams

“Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.”

– Edmund Burke

*Picture source

“But passing by all other considerations, and contemplating merely the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government; that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of republicanism.”

– Benjamin Rush, 
A Defence of the Use of the Bible in Schools American Tract Society

“We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”

– Theodore Roosevelt

*Theodore Roosevelt, photograph by George Grantham Baine, 1885 (source)

“What we do during our working hours determines what we have in the world; what we do in our leisure hours determines what we are.”

– George Eastman

“The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

– Thomas Jefferson

*U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, D.C. (source)