Government governed least is government governed best.

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

The power of making war often prevents it.

I wish to see this beverage become common instead of the whiskey which kills sone-third of our citizens and ruins their families.

I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind.

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.

They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people.