Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading through up to your eyes in blood, you could only end up where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found... all is confusion beyond it.

There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.

The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.