Industry, commerce and security are the surest roads to the happiness and prosperity of people.

If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.

A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.

Our minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country.

How to check these unconstitutional invasions of rights by the Federal judiciary? Not by impeachment in the first instance, but by a strong protestation of both houses of Congress that such and such doctrines advanced by the Supreme Court are contrary to the Constitution; and if afterwards they relapse into the same heresies, impeach and set the whole adrift. For what was the government divided into three branches, but that each should watch over the others and oppose their usurpations?

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

I am for a government rigorously frugal & simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers & salaries merely to make partisans, & for increasing, by every device, the public debt, on the principle of its being a public blessing.