The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.

With those who wish to think amiss of me, I have learnt to be perfectly indifferent: but where I know a mind to be ingenuous, andto need only truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive.

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.

There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.

The only greater [evil] than separation... [is] living under a government of discretion.

From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.

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.