When He send, His messengers will go, His prophets will prophesy, though all the world should forbid them.

There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth or a human combination or society. It hath fallen out sometimes that Papists, Protestants, Jews, and Turks may be embarked in one ship; upon which supposal I affirm that all the liberty of conscience that ever I pleaded for turns upon these two hinges: that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks be forced to come to the ships prayers or worship, nor be compelled [restrained] from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any.

Civil government is an ordinance of God, to conserve the civil peace of a people, so far as concerns their bodies and goods.

The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.

Having bought truth dear, we must not sell it cheap, not the least grain of it for the whole world.

There is a moral virtue, a moral fidelity, ability and honesty, which other men, besides church members, are, by good nature and education, by good laws and good examples nourished and trained up in; so that civil places and trust and credit need not be monopolized into the hands of church members (who sometimes are not fitted for public office), while all others are deprived and despoiled of their natural and civil rights and liberties.

All men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, to maintain their wars to be defensive.