"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men FREE to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall NOT take from the mouth of labor and bread it has EARNED.
This is the sum of good government." — Thomas Jefferson
"It's a REPUBLIC, ma'am - IF you can keep it."
- Ben Franklin (after signing the U.S. Constitution)
READ the "Federalist Papers"
The word "democracy" does NOT appear in the Declaration of Independence, NOR in the US Constitution, NOR in any of the States' Constitutions. However our founding fathers knew exactly what democracy was and were adament in insisting that the USA be a REPUBLIC - rather than a democracy, which the John Birch Society describes as a transition between a Republic and an Oligarchy.
CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC BY DESIGN
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" — Benjamin Franklin
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." — Thomas Jefferson
"Our real disease - which is democracy." — Alexander Hamilton
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." — John Adams
"Hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths... A republic, by which I mean a government in which a scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking." (James Madison, Federalist Papers, the McClean Edition, Federalist Paper #10, page 81, 1788
"Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy; such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable [abominable] cruelty of one or a very few." — John Adams
"A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way. The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty." — Fisher Ames | 
