 Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. |
| A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both. |
| I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment. |
| 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. |
| In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority. |
| If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. |
| A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people. |
| 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. |
| If men were angels, no government would be necessary. |
| The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself. |
| To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. |
| 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. |
| Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense. |
| The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home. |
| The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. |
| The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. |
