Chemistry is yet, indeed, a mere embryon. Its principles are contested; experiments seem contradictory; their subjects are so minute as to escape our senses; and their result too fallacious to satisfy the mind. It is probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system.

Those who wish to be ignorant and free, believe in something that never was and never shall be.

I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.

It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason as to administer medication to the dead.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

One never really knows how much one has been touched by a place until one has left it.

I have ever deemed it more honorable and more profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.