My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs.

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It had only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.

Those who wish to be ignorant and free, believe in something that never was and never shall be.

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.