Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.

Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins and you will have sins in abundance.

It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.

Government is a necessary evil

The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points--his duty God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.

When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.