If you have to eat crow, eat it while it's young and tender.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

In the legislature, the House of Representatives is chosen by less than half the people, and not at all in proportion to those who do choose. The Senate are still more disproportionate, and for long terms of irresponsibility. In the Executive, the Governor is entirely independent of the choice of the people, and of their control; his Council equally so, and at best but a fifth wheel to a wagon. In the Judiciary, the judges of the highest courts are dependent on none but themselves.

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.

Perseverance in object, though not by the most direct way, is often more laudable than perpetual changes, as often as the object shifts light.

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

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.