Ambition is one of the ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable.

The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity

Set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests; in short against the gates of earth and hell.

The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to prevent their growth in our own.

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark" . . . If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?

We must not then depend alone upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for its preservation.