“The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.

Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

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.

It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all.

Think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.

And if this were so in all cases, the principle would be established, that sometimes conditions can be treated by things opposite to those from which they arose, and sometimes by things like to those from which they arose.

Just ’cause something’s popular, it can still be good. In fact, if more people are buying it, then you must be doing something right.