[The people] are in truth the only legitimate proprietors of the soil and government.

None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important.

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen, people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

Our minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country.

Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.