Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

A single zealot may commence prosecutor, and better men be his victims.

Now I will avow, that I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system.

...let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep & a warmer berth below it encircled, with the society of neighbors, friends & fellow laborers of the earth rather than with spies & sycophants ... I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office.

My general plan would be to make the States one as to everything connected with foreign nations and several as to everything purely domestic.