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.

When the course of events shall have removed you to distant scenes of action where laurels not nurtured with the blood of my country may be gathered, I shall urge sincere prayers for your obtaining every honor and preferment which may gladden the heart of a soldier.

I wish to see this beverage become common instead of the whiskey which kills sone-third of our citizens and ruins their families.

From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.

The earth belongs to the living. No man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the use of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living. No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement

Experience has proved to us that a dollar of silver disappears for every dollar of paper emitted.