No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

The word "independence" is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word "dependence" is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption.

Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.

Those physical difficulties which you cannot account for, be very slow to arraign; for he that would be wiser than Nature would be wiser than God.

Priestly was the first (unless it was Becarria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth--that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.