Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

The constitutional freedom of religion is the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights

A properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate.

War has been avoided from a due sense of the miseries, and the demoralization it produces, and of the superior blessings of a state of peace and friendship with all mankind.

A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one.

He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.