The increasing remoteness of consanguinity is everyday diminishing the force of the family compact between France and Spain. And politicians have ever with great reason considered the ties of blood as feeble and precarious links of political connection.

There can be no profit in the making or selling of things to be destroyed in war. Men may think that they have such profit, but in the end the profit will turn out to be a loss.

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

It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.

[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution.

To answer the purpose of the adversaries of the Constitution, they ought to prove, not merely that particular provisions in it are not the best, which might have been imagined; but that the plan upon the whole is bad and pernicious.

Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature....Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind.