The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruption's of time and party, its members would become despots.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in-as-much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors.

We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self - government.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens . . . There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends and books.

Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions.