Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep.

Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution.

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

This [a state militia system] appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.

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.

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

[W]ar is a question, under our constitution, not of Executive, but of Legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say whether the Nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of War.