Daniel Webster People Quotations

On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

We have been taught to regard a representative of the people as a sentinel on the watch-tower of liberty.

The people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.

We are all agents of the same supreme power, the people.

Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from...the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence.

Instruct the mothers of the French people.

I am committed against every thing which in my judgment, may weaken, endanger, or destroy (the Constitution) ... and especially against all extension of Executive power; and I am committed against any attempt to rule the free people of this country by the power and the patronage of the Government itself....

We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people.

There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from anothe quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing.

The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good, and difficult for them to do evil.

The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government.