But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.

One precedent in favor of power is stronger than a hundred against it.

Old heads as well as young may sometimes be charged with ignorance and presumption. The natural course of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be ... The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.

I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern which have come under my observation, none appears to me so pure as that of Jesus....I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.