It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated.

Those who proposed the Constitution knew, and those who ratified the Constitution also knew that this is...a limited government tied down to specified powers....It was never supposed or suspected that the old Congress could give away the money of the states to encourage agriculture or for any other purpose they pleased.

In framing a system, which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce.

Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself.

Power is of an encroaching nature.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.