A Man's management of his own purse speaks volumes about character

Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

The contradictory experiments of chemists leave us at liberty to conclude what we please. My conclusion is, that art has not yet invented sufficient aids to enable such subtle bodies [air, light, &c.] to make a well-defined impression on organs as blunt as ours; that it is laudable to encourage investigation but to hold back conclusion.

Trade liberty for safety or money and you'll end up with neither. Liberty, like a grain of salt, easily dissolves. The power of questioning - not simply believing - has no friends. Yet liberty depends on it.

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.

I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on the earth.