My great wish is to go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty; to avoid attracting notice, and to keep my name out of the newspapers.

Nothing is so engaging as the little domestic cares into which you appear to be entering, and as to reading it is useful for onlyfilling up the chinks of more useful and healthy occupations.

I have so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government, that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force.

We abhor the follies of war, and are not untried in its distresses and calamities. Unmeddling with the affairs of other nations, we had hoped that our distance and our dispositions would have left us free, in the example and indulgence of peace with all the world.

I shall rejoin myself to my native country, with new attachments, and with exaggerated esteem for its advantages; for though there is less wealth there, there is more freedom, more ease, and less misery.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude