Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

If your letters are as long as the bible, they will appear short to me. Only let them be brim full of affection.

Although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.

Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself.

I join cordially in admiring and revering the Constitution of the United States, the result of the collected wisdom of our country. That wisdom has committed to us the important task of proving by example that a government, if organized in all its parts on the Representative principle unadulterated by the infusion of spurious elements, if founded, not in the fears & follies of man, but on his reason, on his sense of right, on the predominance of the social over his dissocial passions, may be so free as to restrain him in no moral right, and so firm as to protect him from every moral wrong.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.