The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property.

Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.

Dependence begets subservience and paves the way for tyranny.

The excellence of every government is its adaptation to the state of those to be governed by it.

An industrious farmer occupies a more dignified place in the scale of beings...than a lazy lounger...too proud to work, and drawing out a miserable existence by eating on that surplus of other men's labor.

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

No man has done everything he can who has done only his best.