3. Moral philosophy. ... man was destined for society. his morality therefore was to be formed to this object. he was endowed with a sense of right & wrong merely relative to this. this sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling ... the moral sense, or...

I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilisation. I suspect it is in their kitchens & not in their churches that their reformation must be worked, & that Missionaries of that description from hence would avail...

Bishop Grégoire ... wrote to me also on the doubts I had expressed five or six & twenty years ago, in the Notes on Virginia, as to the grade of understanding of the negroes, & he sent me his book on the literature of the negroes. his credulity has made him gather up every story he could...

I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician. I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new...

I have not been in the habit of mysterious reserve on any subject, nor of buttoning up my opinions within my own doublet. on the contrary, while in public service especially, I have thought the public entitled to frankness, and intimately to know whom they employed.

I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. my hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

I cannot act as if all men were unfaithful because some are so; nor believe that all will betray me, because some do. I had rather be the victim of occasional infidelities, than relinquish my general confidence in the honesty of man.

fortitude, you know, is one of his four cardinal virtues. that teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like cowards. and to fly too in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at every turn of our road.

as to federal slanders, I never wished them to be answered, but by the tenor of my life, half a century of which has been on a theatre at which the public have been spectators, and competent judges of it’s merit. their approbation has taught a lesson, useful to the world, that the man who fears...

I console myself with the reflection that those who will come after us will be as wise as we are, & as able to take care of themselves as we have been.