Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands.

Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.

I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on the earth.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us.

In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.