Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes, which you say you have heard insisted on by some, I assure you was never mine.

Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity

The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased me: The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or otherwise to publish anything but false facts affecting injuriously the life, liberty or reputation of others, or affecting the peace of the [United States] with foreign nations.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others... An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.... Power is not alluring to pure minds and is not with them the primary principle of contest.