The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to prevent their growth in our own.
The furnace of affliction produces refinement in states as well as individuals. And the new Governments we are assuming in every part will require a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or there will be no blessings.
Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.
As the happiness of the people is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it.
The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation: The doctrine of a supreme, intelligent sovereign of the universe, I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.
Genius is sorrow’s child.
The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.
They shall not be expected to acknowledge us until we have acknowledged ourselves.
Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?
We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest.
You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. And you can write ten times better than I can.
During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.
Elections to office, which are the great objects of ambition, I look at with terror!
It is much easier to pull down a government, in such a conjuncture of affairs as we have seen, than to build up, at such a season as the present.
The rights of Englishmen are derived from God, not from king or Parliament, and would be secured by the study of history, law, and tradition.
National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman, and that there is an obligation to perform such a duty absolutely irrespective of party politics or factional differences.
We are in the the very midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.
The people “have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge- I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers.”
The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.