That which parents should take care of... is to distinguish between the wants of fancy, and those of nature.

Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

The power of the legislative being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands.

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

[Individuals] have a right to defend themselves and recover by force what by unlawful force is taken from them.

To give a man full knowledge of morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.