I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

I acknowledge that such a debt [of service to my fellow-citizens] exists, that a tour of duty in whatever line he can be most useful to his country, is due from every individual. It is not easy perhaps to say of what length exactly that tour should be, but we may safely say of what length it should not be. Not of our whole life, for instance, for that would be to be born a slave-not even of a very large portion of it.

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarrantors of only our own.

Unmerited abuse wounds, while unmerited praise has not the power to heal.

He [Washington] has often declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it. And these declarations he repeated to me the oftener and the more pointedly.

Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow.