Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs.

Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

The chief purpose of government is to protect life. Abandon that and you have abandoned all.

Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise, in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

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

When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches.