“The dead should not rule the living.”

“Be polite to all, but intimate with few.”

“Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.”

“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

“No people who are ignorant can be truly free.”

“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.”

“The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.”

“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.”

“Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.”

“I consider him [Alexander von Humboldt] the most important scientist whom I have met.”

“Self-love is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.”

“Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”

“When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” 

“[It is a] happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrant.”