American Quotations by William J. Federer 2024

John Jay (June 23, 1817-May 5, 1894) was an American lawyer and diplomat. He was the son of Judge William Jay and the grandson of John Jay, the Founding Father who was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the manager of the New York Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society in 1834; secretary of the Irish Relief Commission during the potato famine in 1847; U.S. Minister to Austria, 1869-75; and the vice-president of the Civil Service Reform Association of the State of New York. He served as the president of the American Historical Society, 1890; as well as being an...

Frederick Douglass (February 1817-February 20, 1895) was a commanding abolitionist and spokesman for slaves, having been a former slave himself. Thousands of people were brought out of their indifferent attitude toward the value of human life by his powerful orations exposing the silent scream of the slaves. Many were deeply moved away from the opinion that it was a person's choice whether or not to enslave another person, and multitudes began supporting the right to life for all humans, regardless of their race or circumstances. Frederick Douglass included this story in retelling his conversion: <I loved all mankind, slaveholder not excepted,...

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American anti-slavery author, naturalist, and transcendentalist philosopher from Concord, Massachusetts. A Harvard graduate, he was a contemporary of authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among his best known writings were: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), which influenced the environmentalism movement; and Civil Disobedience (1849), which influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In Civil Disobedience (1849), Henry David Thoreau wrote: <"That government is best which governs least"...Government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got...

Pennsylvania Supreme Court (1817) in the case of The Commonwealth v. Wolf, 3 Serg. & R. 48, 50 (1817), stated the court's opinion as follows: <Laws cannot be administered in any civilized government unless the people are taught to revere the sanctity of an oath, and look to a future state of rewards and punishments for the deeds of this life. It is of the utmost moment, therefore, that they should be reminded of their religious duties at stated periods....A wise policy would naturally lead to the formation of laws calculated to subserve those salutary purposes. The invaluable privilege of the rights...

Indiana (December 11, 1816) was 19th State admitted to the Union. On August 7, 1789, President George Washington signed into law an Act of Congress which prohibited slavery from entering the territory, titled "An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio," Article VI. On April 13, 1816, President James Madison signed The Enabling Act for Indiana, which required the government being formed in that territory to be: <...not repugnant to the [Northwest Ordinance].> 1816IN001 The Northwest Ordinance stated: <SECTION 13. And, for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which...