Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption.
A victorious and powerful ally is but another name for a master.
Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrant.
Where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure.
The most common and durable source of faction has been the various and unequal distribution of property.
Respect for character is always diminished in proportion to the number among whom the blame or praise is to be divided.
No distinction seems to be more obvious than that between spiritual and temporal matters. Yet whenever they have been made objects of Legislation, they have clashed and contended with each other, till one or the other has gained the supremacy.
Our opinions agree as to the evil, moral, political, and economical, of slavery.
Measures should be enacted which, without violating the rights of property, would reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.
Government destitute of energy, will ever produce anarchy.
If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within.
Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.
War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.
Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.
The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.
Man, who preys both on the vegetable and animal species, is himself a prey to neither. He too possesses the reproductive principle far beyond the degree requisite for the bare continuance of his species. What becomes of the surplus of human life to which this principle is competent?
I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.
Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.
A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.