My heart trembles when I reflect that God is just.
The failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.
The concentrating of powers in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by God.
A share in the sovereignty of the state, which is exercised by the citizens at large, in voting at elections is one of the most important rights of the subject, and in a republic ought to stand foremost in the estimation of the law.
Every male citizen of the commonwealth, liable to taxes or to militia duty in any county, shall have a right to vote for representatives for that county to the legislature.
The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people.
I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.
Law is often the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
Responsibility is a tremendous engine in a free government.
Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree.
Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.
With nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.
I shall rejoin myself to my native country, with new attachments, and with exaggerated esteem for its advantages; for though there is less wealth there, there is more freedom, more ease, and less misery.
The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.
War is not the best engine for us to resort to; nature has given us one in our commerce, which if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.
I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.
It must be observed that our revenues are raised almost wholly on imported goods.
Still less, let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.