We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands; we have a check upon two branches of the legislature.

Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.

The balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land.

A representative assembly, although extremely well qualified, and absolutely necessary, as a branch of the legislative, is unfit to exercise the executive power, for want of two essential properties, secrecy and dispatch.

And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

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

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.