Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

I hope that we have not labored in vain, and that our experiment will still prove that men can be governed by reason.

Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law.

I love peace, and am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.