Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.
I never before knew the full value of trees. Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read and receive my company.
The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.
No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.
The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.
Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself.
Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.
Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.
The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.
The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.
The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.
I prefer to be remembered for what I have done for others, not what others have done for me.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them.
Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.
I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.
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.