The Bible is the cornerstone of liberty.

What i value more than all things, good humor.

What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?

Never throw off the best affections of nature in the moment when they become most precious to their object; nor fear to extend you hand to save another, lest you should sink yourself.

I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.

If [God] has made it a law in the nature of man to pursue his own happiness, He has left him free in the choice of place as well as mode, and we may safely call on the whole body of English jurists to produce the map on which nature has traced for each individual the geographical line which she forbids him to cross in pursuit of happiness.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.