Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.

I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other.

No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

The question is not whether you have a right to render people miserable, but whether it is not in your best interest to make them happy.

In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.