The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.

Our ancestors ... possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ... It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.

I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

We owe gratitude to France, justice to England, good will to all, and subservience to none ... it was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back.