the execution of the laws is more important than the making them.

I receive with pleasure this recognition & renewal of our former acquaintance, and shall be happy to continue it by an exchange of epistolary communications. your’s to me will be always welcome; your first gives me information in the line of Natural history, & the second (not yet recieved...

The interests of a nation, when well understood, will be found to coincide with their moral duties. among these it is an important one to cultivate habits of peace & friendship with our neighbors. to do this we should make provision for rendering the justice we must sometimes require from...

our citizens are divided into two political sects. one which fears the people most, the other the government. you will readily judge in which of these the people themselves are. for my part I have no fear of a people, well-informed, easy in their circumstances, dispersed over their farms, &...

political conversation I really dislike, & therefore avoid where I can without affectation. but when urged by others, I have never concieved that having been in public life requires me to bely my sentiments, nor even to conceal them. when I am led by conversation to express them, I do it with...

I love to see honest men & honorable men at the helm, men who will not bend their politics to their purses, nor pursue measures by which they may profit, & then profit by their measures.

When I retired from this place and the office of Secretary of state, it was in the firmest contemplation of never more returning here. There had indeed been suggestions in the public papers that I was looking towards a succession to the President’s chair. But feeling a consciousness of their...

as to myself I sincerely wish that the whole Union may accomodate their interests to each other, & play into their hands mutually as members of the same family, that the wealth & strength of any one part should be viewed as the wealth & strength of the whole.

politics & party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here. they seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.

I will never believe that man is incapable of self-government; that he has no resources but in a master, who is but a man like himself, and generally a worse man, inasmuch as power tends to deprave him.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. during the whole of the last war, which was trying enough, I never deserted a friend because he had taken an opposite side; and those of my own state who joined the British...

All too will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.