If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi... in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy them all.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

The more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.

Yet by such worthless beings is a great nation to be governed and even made to deify their old king because he is only a fool and a maniac, and to forgive and forget his having lost to them a great and flourishing empire.

All men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. . . . We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

I have great confidence in the common sense of mankind in general.