We are here lounging our time away, doing nothing, and having nothing to do. It gives me great regret to be passing my time so uselessly when it could have been so importantly employed at home.

. . . in the full tide of successful experiment.

There are two amendments only which I am anxious for: 1. A bill of rights, which it is so much the interest of all to have that I conceive it must be yielded...2. The restoring of the principle of necessary rotation, particularly to the Senate and Presidency, but most of all to the last.

We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication .

I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man.

From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.