I have examined all religions, and the result is that the Bible is the best book in the world.

Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.

The study and practice of law ... does not dissolve the obligations of morality or of religion.

We must not then depend alone upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for its preservation.

I consider a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for public service.

You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.

A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

Did you ever see a portrait of a great man without perceiving strong traits of pain and anxiety?

It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.

During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.

Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.

Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart

Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.

The Constitution is ...the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen

Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.

Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul.

[I] never understood [what a republican government was and] I believe no other man ever did or ever will.

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.

Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years?

There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state.

I read my Eyes out, and cant read half enough neither. The more one reads the more one sees We have to read.

The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.

It's of more importance to community that innocence should be protected than it is that guilt should be punished

Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.

The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

Ambition is one of the ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable.

Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'

But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

The only way to form an army to be confided in, was a systematic discipline, by which means all men may be made heroes.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

As the happiness of the people is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it.

It will be celebrated... with pomp and parade... bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.

The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.

Government has no Right to hurt a hair of the head of an Atheist, for his Opinions. Let him have a care of his Practices.

The numbers of men in all ages have preferred ease, slumber, and good cheer to liberty, when they have been in competition.

We are in the the very midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.

If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle

There's no such thing as a free lunch, unless you have a coupon for a free lunch...or someone gives you a lunch...never mind.

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands; we have a check upon two branches of the legislature.

All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great dangers and uncertain effects.

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