To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.
If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
I find as I grow older that I love those most whom I loved first.
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.
The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.
The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management.
The rights of the people to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.
The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.
Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.
No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness.
There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
Lethargy is the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.
Our attachment to no nation on earth should supplant our attachment to liberty.