If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security.
Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, February 12, 1779

It is certainly true that a popular government cannot flourish without virtue in the people.
Richard Henry Lee, letter to Colonel Martin Pickett, March 5, 1786

While the people retain their virtue and vigilence, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.
Abraham Lincoln

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
John Adams in a speech to the military in 1798

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thomas Jefferson

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill

That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.
Abraham Lincoln

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
Martin Luther King Jr.