“In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

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.

A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

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.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity.

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

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.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.

That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

That requires that we listen to one another and get challenged and grow by living with difference within the body of the church.

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.

The ones that are running rampant within our churches largely go unaddressed.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles.

You plant the gospel. You don’t plant churches.

It’s not so much that the church has a mission, it’s that the mission of God has a church.

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice.

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.