No group is quoted—and misquoted—more often than America’s founders. When a political controversy heats up, the nation’s speechwriters, politicians, reporters, editorial writers, and talking heads try to influence the debate by quoting their words. Year in and year out, teachers and political buffs look to their wisdom to illuminate the issues. How much easier it would be to find every key quote by the founders in a single source. The Quotable Founding Fathers, edited by Buckner F. Melton, Jr., provides just that source—a compilation of some 2,500 quotes summing up the wit and wisdom of the founders. While some of these quotations can be found in general quotation compilations such as Bartlett’s, these volumes offer only a fraction of what’s available.

The Quotable Founding Fathers mines deeper into the founders’ essays, diaries, letters, speeches, and sermons to extract all the nuggets that are significant to the history of the country— and to the ongoing debate about the meaning of democracy in America.