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There is what I call the American idea. I so name it, because it seems to me to lie at the basis of all our truly original, distinctive, and American institutions. It is itself a complex idea, composed of three subordinate and more simple ideas, namely: The idea that all men have unalienable rights; that in respect thereof, all men are created equal; and that government is to be established and sustained for the purpose of giving every man an opportunity for the enjoyment and development of all these unalienable rights. This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom.
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The American Idea, a speech at New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston (29 May 1850)
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Variant : This is what I call the American idea of freedom — a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice — the unchanging law of God.
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As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1891) by Tryon Edwards, p. 17; an earlier statement of such sentiments was made by Benjamin Disraeli in Vivian Grey (1826), Book VI, Ch. 7: "all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist." Parker was also very likely familiar with Daniel Webster's statements referring to "The people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people" in a speech on Foot's Resolution (26 January 1830); the most famous use of such phrasing came in Abraham Lincoln's, Gettysburg Address (19 November 1863) when using words probably inspired by Parker's he declared: "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Fifty eight years later, in 1921, Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), Founder of Modern China, credited Lincoln's immortal words as the inspiration of his Three Principles of the People (????) articulated in a speech delivered on March 6, 1921, at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National People’s Party in Guangzhou. The Three Principles of the People are still enshrined in the Constitution of Taiwan. According to Lyon Sharman, "Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning, a Critical Biography" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934), Dr. Sun wrote that his own three principles “correspond with the principles stated by President Lincoln—‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’ I translated them into … the people (are) to have . . . the people (are) to govern and . . . the people (are) to enjoy.”

 

Theodore Parker

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"Americans today are being asked to subscribe to an ideology that is against the American idea. It's an ideology that says that government creates rights-and government takes them away. This ideology rejects the goal of government as securing equal opportunity, it demands that government create equal results. It is an ideology that treats citizens like children and politicians like divinities. It is not an ideology that need prevail in American life. Not on our watch."

 

Paul Ryan

 

It may now be easily seen how great the difference is between the institution of government, as understood by Paine and the Declaration of Independence, and the institution of the State. ... The nature and intention of government … are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

 

Albert Jay Nock

 

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

 

Ronald Reagan

 

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish Government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government.

 

George Washington

 

Certainly the Government of the United States is a limited government, and so is every State government a limited government. With us this idea of limitation spreads through every form of administration — general, State, and municipal — and rests on the great distinguishing principle of the recognition of the rights of man. The ancient republics absorbed the individual in the state — prescribed his religion and controlled his activity. The American system rests on the assertion of the equal right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of conscience, to the culture and exercise of all his faculties. As a consequence the State government is limited — as to the General Government in the interest of union, as to the individual citizen in the interest of freedom.

 

Andrew Johnson