- George Washington: If - to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterward defend our work? Let us reach a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.
- Returning Soldiers: [singing] Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle dandy, Mind the music and the step, And with the girls be handy.
- Returning Soldier #1: I have to get home soon. My wife moved to the village with her mother and left my farm lyin' idle.
- Returning Soldier #2: Oh, lyin' idle! That sounds good to me!
- Returning Soldier #3: A real feather bed. Good food. Peace and quiet.
- Returning Soldier #4: Liberty! It was worth fightin' for.
- Benjamin Franklin: Mr. President, a carpenter, when he wants to fit two boards together, he sometimes saws a little off of both.
- Digby of South Carolina: South Carolina will insist that in determining population as a basis for representation, that the blacks be counted equally with the whites.
- Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania: Mr. President! Mr. President.
- George Washington: Mr. Gouverneur Morris.
- Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania: If such a motion is passed, the slave ships will be dumping hundreds of thousands of blacks on our shores each year - to give the Southern states an overwhelming balance of power in the legislature. I can never agree to give such encouragement to the slave trade.
- Benjamin Franklin: I always feel a strange quality in music. It makes me feel warm and tolerant. I thought it might stir the same feeling in you gentlemen from the South and Mr. Morris, here - even though you don't think alike regarding slavery.
- George Washington: We'll fashion a government to fit an expanding nation. The amendment clause makes it possible for Americans, 500 years from now, to shape it to their needs.
- Benjamin Franklin: Instead of the people being the servants of the Constitution, the Constitution will be the servant of the people.
- [last lines]
- Benjamin Franklin: Since the Convention was opened, I've wondered about that painted sun. In the vicissitudes of hope and fear, I was not able to tell whether it was rising or setting. Now, I know - that it is a rising sun.