Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true.

Mingling religion with politics may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.

What more does man want to know than that the hand or power that made these things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe this with the force it is impossible to repel, if he permits his reason to act, and his rule of moral life will follow of course.

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

When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.

To be nobly wrong is more manly than to be meanly right.