With nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.

An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second.

That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe. at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together.

I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word in only one way.

While prudence will endeavor to avoid this issue of war, bravery will prepare to meet it.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others... An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.... Power is not alluring to pure minds and is not with them the primary principle of contest.