We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of...

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold.

Our constitution is a peace establishment it is not calculated for war. War would endanger its existence.

Most virtues when carried beyond certain bonds degenerate into vices.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks...

The dead should not rule the living.

If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the...

So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.

I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time till at length it becomes habitual.

For Heaven’s sake discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum

I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I...

If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.

He who knows best knows how little he knows

Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a...

I think we are a more dangerous team with what we can do this season,

Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. Protection from casual embarrassments, however, may sometimes be seasonably interposed.

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.