War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perserverance, by time, and by practice.

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

Every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term a right to employ all the means requisite . . . to the attainment of the ends of such power.

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.

A nation has a right to manage its own concerns as it thinks fit.

Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.

It is astonishing that so simple a truth should ever have had an adversary; and it is one among a multitude of proofs, how apt a spirit of ill-informed jealousy, or of too great abstraction and refinement is to lead men astray from the plainest paths of reason and conviction.