To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.

They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people.

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

The sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also.

I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.