From such beginnings of governments, what could be expected, but a continual system of war and extortion?

Rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another. It is impossible to discover any origin of rights otherwise than in the origin of man; it consequently follows that rights appertain to man in right of his existence, and must therefore be equal to every man.

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.

Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous consciousness of honor.