The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom.
The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes – the laboring and the learned. The laboring will need the first grade of education to qualify them for their pursuits and duties; the learned will need it as a foundation for further acquirements.
It is highly interesting to our country, and it is the duty of its functionaries, to provide that every citizen in it should receive an education proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his life.
Light and liberty go together.
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.
An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.
The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.
The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.
We sometimes from dreams pick up some hint worth improving by reflection.
When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither.
I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away.
I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times.
He does most in God’s great world who does his best in his own little world.
The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution.
In reviewing the history of the times through which we have passed, no portion of it gives greater satisfaction or reflection, than that which represents the efforts of the friends of religious freedom and the success with which they are crowned.
But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments?
Turning, then, from this loathsome combination of church and state, and weeping over the follies of our fellow men, who yield themselves the willing dupes and drudges of these mountebanks, I consider reformation and redress as desperate, and abandon them to the Quixotism of more enthusiastic minds.
Nothing but free argument, raillery and even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.