The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.

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.

It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than prompted, by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.

Can it be of less consequence that the meaning of a Constitution should be fixed and known, than a meaning of a law should be so?

[The public has] the habit now of invalidating opinions emanating from me by reference to my age and infirmities.

The great desideratum in Government is, so to modify the sovereignty as that it may be sufficiently neutral between different parts of the Society to controul one part from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.