`Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government.

Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country. - March 15, 1783

No people can be bound to acknowledge the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the united States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency

Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a person’s own mind, than on the externals in the world.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

But if we are to be told by a foreign Power . . . what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little.

This spirit [of Party], unfortunately, is inseperable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind. It exists under different shapes in all Governments, more or less stifled, controuled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.