Founding Father's Quotes

Resistance to sudden violence for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I never surrendered to the public by the compact of society and which, perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. The maxims of the law and the precepts of Christianity are precisely coincident in relation to this subject.– John Adams

The great natural law of self-preservation cannot be repealed or superseded or suspended by any human institution. The right of the citizens to bear arms in the defense of themselves shall not be questioned. Every man’s house is deemed by the law to be his castle; and the law invests him with the power and places on him the duty of the commanding officer of his house. Every man’s house is his castle, and if anyone be robbed in it, it shall be esteemed his own default and negligence.– James Wilson

I will to my dying day oppose with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery and villainy as a writ of assistance is. It is the worst instrument of arbitrary power and is destructive of liberty and the fundamental principles of law. One of the most essential rights is the freedom of one’s house – a man’s house is his castle, but these writs totally annihilate this right. It is a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer…who may reign secure in his petty tyranny and spread terror and desolation around him. Both reason and the Constitution are against such writs. – James Otis

Founding Father John Adams would later recall the speech by James Otis in this way: American independence was then and there born…Every man in the crowded audience went away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, namely in 1776, he grew up to manhood and declared himself free.– John Adams