The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.
The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Every proprietor owes to the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds.
A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight most often, are within.
Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property... Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.
I consider the war of America against Britain as the country’s war, the public’s war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
There is no greater tyranny than that of the dead over the living.
Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind.
The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.
The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.
I have never made it a consideration whether the subject was popular or unpopular, but whether it was right or wrong; for that which is right will become popular, and that which is wrong, though by mistake it may obtain the cry or fashion of the day, will soon lose the power of delusion, and sink into disesteem.