The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.

The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.

Principles . . . become modified in practice, by facts.

In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.