I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it
Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...
History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.
I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.
Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.
It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.
The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.