God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.
It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.
The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is the best.
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.
Motherhood is the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness.
Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment.
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.
It is not the policy of the government in America to give aid to works of any kind. They let things take their natural course without help or impediment, which is generally the best policy.
Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.
Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.
I think it is a great error to consider a heavy tax on wines as a tax on luxury. On the contrary, it is a tax on the health of our citizens.
What we learn to do, we learn by doing.
I join you therefore in branding as cowardly the idea that the human mind is incapable of further advances.
I hope the necessity will at length be seen of establishing institutions, here as in Europe, where every branch of science, useful at this day, may be taught in it’s highest degrees.
I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.
This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.
But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.
Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.