Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.
The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.
Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.
As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.
The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.
Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.
A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
