[Self-defense is] justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the laws of society.

Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief on faith is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge.

And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.

To deny the possibility, nay, the actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament, and the thing itself is a Truth to which every nation in the world hath, in its turn, borne testimony, by either example seemingly well attested or by prohibitory laws, which at least suppose the possibility of a commerce with evil spirits.

Mankind will not be reasoned out of the feelings of humanity.

Herein indeed consists the excellence of the English government, that all parts of it form a mutual check upon each other.

Man must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator. This will of his Maker is called the Law of Nature. This Law of Nature is superior to any other. No human laws are of any validity if contrary to this.