Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.
Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.
Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.
When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.
In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance
I find that the harder I work , the more luck I seem to have.
New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.
The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I m...
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, wh...
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
The probable accumulation of the surpluses of revenue beyond what can be applied to the payment of the public debt... merits the consideration of Congress. Shall it lie unproductive in the public vaul...
I have no ambition to govern men it is a painful and thankless office.
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
We never repent of having eaten too little.
No nation is drunken where wine is cheap and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is in truth the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.
Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.
History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
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.
The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.