The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.

We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge.

America is rising with a giant's strength. Its bones are yet but cartilages.

The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.

A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

[the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.