Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.

The earth belongs to the living. No man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the use of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living. No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.

Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.