When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

I do most anxiously wish to see the highest degrees of education given to the higher degrees of genius and to all degrees of it, so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world and to keep their part of it going on right; for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.

Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.

In the constitution of Spain as proposed by the late Cortes, there was a principle entirely new to me:... that no person born after that day should ever acquire the rights of citizenship until he could read and write. It is impossible sufficiently to estimate the wisdom of this provision. Of all those which have been thought of for securing fidelity in the administration of the government, constant reliance to the principles of the constitution, and progressive amendments with the progressive advances of the human mind or changes in human affairs, it is the most effectual.

Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.

Bind them down by the chains of the Constitution where they can do no mischief.

[Oppose] with manly firmness [any] invasions on the rights of the people.