What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statutes the next.

Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.

The great leading objects of the federal government, in which revenue is concerned, are to maintain domestic peace, and provide for the common defense.

It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the Public Good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend they always reason right about the means of promoting it.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

The honor of a nation is its life. Deliberately to abandon it is to commit an act of political suicide.

There is a contagion in example which few men have sufficient force of mind to resist.