I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain.

My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.

Music...This is the favorite passion of my soul.

The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience.