I hope this will find you...enjoying the commencement of a new year with every prospect that can make it a happy one.

No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not the executive department. ... The trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.

From the the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.

Happily for the states, they enjoy the utmost freedom of religion. This freedom arises from that multiplicity of sects which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society.

Americans need not fear the federal government because they enjoy the advantage of being armed, which you possess over the people of almost every other nation.