Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man.

The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier, and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.

Laws abridging the natural right of the citizen should be restrained by rigorous constructions within their narrowest limits.

Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state'... is absolutely essential in a free society.

I hope the terms of Excellency, Honor, Worship, Esquire, forever disappear from among us... I wish that of Mr. would follow them.

Freedom, the first-born of science.