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Our present political position has been achieved in a manner unprecedented in the history of nations. It illustrates the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established.

— Jefferson Davis

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Source, in full

inaugural address as president of the Confederate States of America, Montgomery, Alabama (February 18, 1861); in Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist, His Letters, Papers and Speeches (1923), vol. 5, p. 50.

More quotes by Jefferson Davis

If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.

We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.

Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.

Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress... to roll back the whole current of human thought, and again return to the mere brute force which prevails between beasts of prey, as the only method of settling questions between men?

Speech (1861)

...How idle is this prating about natural rights as though still containing all that had been forfeited.

All Jefferson Davis quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jefferson Davis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.