Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

Power always thinks... that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

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

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.

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

Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.

A government of laws, and not of men.

While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill - little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.

The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.

I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels which I have sown, others to eat the bread which I have earned. A common case.

The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a theatrical show. Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that... and all the glory of it.

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

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.