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...
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
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.
When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
Never spend your money before you have earned it.
I have no ambition to govern men it is a painful and thankless office.
Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.
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.
I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot inv...
No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.
Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.
Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.
No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of th...
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common st...