[O]ur rules can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.

I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.

in the spring he will attend your botanical course. his natural turn is very strongly to the objects of your two courses of lectures, and I hope you will have reason to be contended with his capacity & character.

It should be our endeavor to cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation, even of that which has injured us most.

We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.

If the book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.