I acknowledge that such a debt [of service to my fellow-citizens] exists, that a tour of duty in whatever line he can be most useful to his country, is due from every individual. It is not easy perhaps to say of what length exactly that tour should be, but we may safely say of what length it should not be. Not of our whole life, for instance, for that would be to be born a slave-not even of a very large portion of it.

It is a misnomer to call a government republican in which a branch of the supreme power is independent of the nation.

I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe.... They are nations of eternal war.

Debt and revolution are inseparable as cause and effect.

We owe gratitude to France, justice to England, good will to all, and subservience to none ... it was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back.

Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by God.

Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elemental trait of painting or sculpture.