The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom.

The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.

When the heart is right, the feet are swift.

Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.

Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.

The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.

Where everyman is participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year but everyday, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.