The issuing power [of money] should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

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

The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.

It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.

I long to be in the midst of the children, and have more pleasure in their little follies than in the wisdom of the wise.