“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.”

What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?

The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.

Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

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.

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.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.