Your proposal raises the greatest mischief that can befall my country. You could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable. Let me conjure you then, if you have any regard for your country, concern for your self or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind, never communicate, as from yourself, or anyone else, a sentiment of the like nature.

The Arts and Sciences, essential to the prosperity of the State and to the ornament of human life, have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind.

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.

Submit your sentiments with diffidence. A dictatorial style, though it may carry conviction, is always accompanied with disgust.

You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do every thing they can to assist you in this wise intention.

Influence is not government.

[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists . . . an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.