Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands.

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind.

The right to use a thing comprehends a right to the means necessary to its use, and without which it would be useless.

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelve-month between the ingross-ing a bill & passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word: and that if circum-stances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.