We are overdone with banking institutions, which have banished the precious metals, and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium... These have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness... These are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.

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

When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.

the boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.