War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent.

The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.

Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I am sure that in estimating every man's value either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and that learning and talents are only the second.

No government can continue good, but under the control of the people.