"It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail."

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be."

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories."

"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

"I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial."

"I cannot live without books."

"There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents."

"It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth."

"Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

"The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes."

"Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do."

"The hole and the patch should be commensurate."

"I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."

"Peace commerce and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none."

"I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

"Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances."

"The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction."

"When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through it is best to make up our minds to meet it with firmness and accommodate everything to it in the best way practical. This lessons the evil while fretting and fuming only serve to increase your own torments."

"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference."

"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."

"Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions."

"The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world."

"An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes."

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

"...it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same."

"Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail."

"The most successful war seldom pays for its losses."

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape."

"Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence."

"In questions of power let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution."

"For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security."

"When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred."

"No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any."

"No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it. The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred."

"An injured friend is the bitterest of foes."

"Equal rights for all special privileges for none."

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

"I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another."

"The dead should not rule the living."

"In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance."

"It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion."

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."

"I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."

"Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

"He who knows best knows how little he knows."

"France freed from that monster Bonaparte must again become the most agreeable country on earth. It would be the second choice of all whose ties of family and fortune give a preference to some other one and the first choice of all not under those ties."

"I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad."

"The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead."

"Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing."