No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.

Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its happiness.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.