Nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they should get out of the way and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform.

We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self - government.

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.

The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts.

Debt and revolution are inseparable as cause and effect.

The law of self-preservation is higher than written law.

I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living. . . . We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another. . . . The earth belongs always to the living generations.