I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse and in a republican government more than in any other.
James MadisonRead
America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.
Interpretation
Immigration has been crucial to America's growth and success.
James Madison emphasizes the vital role that immigration has played in shaping America, attributing the nation's settlement and prosperity to the contributions of immigrants. He suggests that areas in America which welcomed immigrants have thrived in various aspects such as population growth, agriculture, and cultural developments, highlighting the interconnectedness of immigration and national advancement.
In practice
In speeches about cultural diversity, one might quote Madison to emphasize the importance of immigration.
I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse and in a republican government more than in any other.
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.
The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
The magnitude of this evil among us is so deeply felt, and so universally acknowledged, that no merit could be greater than that of devising a satisfactory remedy for it.
Our generation was born during the turmoil following the First World War. That war marked the dividing line - at least for the Western World - between the comfortable security of the 19th century and the instability and flux of our own time.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
During the twentieth century, men fought on behalf of nationalism. Yet the wars they fought were also engendered by dislocations in world markets and by social revolution stimulated by the coming of the industrial age.
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