[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.

Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption

What a perversion of the normal order of things! ... to make power the primary and central object of the social system, and Liberty but its satellite.

The appointment of senators by the state legislatures . . . is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government, as must secure the authority of the former.

The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.