I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on the earth.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.

I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.

A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sin and suffering.

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.

The Gothic idea that we were to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion and government by whom it has been recommended, and whose purposes it would answer. But it is not an idea which this country will endure.