Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.

There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.

You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the [government] ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

A superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order.

A little rebellion is a good thing.

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error... They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only... If [free enquiry] be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged.