We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We're starting to put more and more textbooks into our schools. We've become accustomed of late of putting little books into the hands of children, containing fables and moral lessons. We're spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools. The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other man-made book.

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.

[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.

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.

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices, and ambitions of their leaders is a democracy.

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.