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.

Delay is preferable to error.

With nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.

Tranquility is the old man's milk.

I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.

There are other places at which ... the laws have said there shall be towns; but Nature has said there shall not, and they remain unworthy of enumeration.