I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier.

The evils which of necessity encompass the life of man are sufficiently numerous. Why should we add to them by voluntarily distressing and destroying one another? Peace, brothers, is better than war. In a long and bloody war, we lose many friends, and gain nothing. Let us then live in peace and friendship together, doing to each other all the good we can.

The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery.

The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.

The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.