Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous.

The [president] has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction. . . .

That experience is the parent of wisdom is an adage the truth of which is recognized by the wisest as well as the simplest of mankind.

There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious.

Establish that a Government may decline a provision for its debts, though able to make it, and you overthrow all public morality, you unhinge all the principles that must preserve the limits of free constitutions.

When men, engaged in unjustifiable pursuits, are aware that obstructions may come from a quarter which bare apprehension of opposition from doing what they would with eagerness rush into if no such external impediments were to be feared.

The treaties of the United States, to have any force at all, must be considered as part of the law of the land.