The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.

A Constitution is not the act of a Government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is a power without right.

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.

For the fate of Charles the first, hath only made kings more subtle — not more just.

The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.

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

Uncritical reverence for the Founding Fathers was less ubiquitous while they actually lived. . . . "The Reign of Terror that raged in America during the latter end of the Washington Administration, and the whole of that of Adams, is enveloped in mystery to me. That there were men in the Government hostile to the representative system, was once their toast, though it is now their overthrow, and therefore the fact is established against them."