The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered. [Query XIII, “Constitution”]

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.

I sincerely wish with you we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles. this is a...

I am happy to hear of his good health. I think he will outlive us all, I mean the Declaration-men, altho’ our senior since the death of Colo Floyd. it is a race in which I have no ambition to win. man, like the fruit he eats, has his period of ripeness. like that too, if he continues longer...

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.

how can expedition be expected from a body which we have saddled with an hundred lawyers, whose trade is talking?

to do wrong is a melancholy resource. even where retaliation renders it indispensably necessary. it is better to suffer much from the scalpings, the incensions conflagrations, the rapes and rapine of savages, than to countenance and strengthen such barbarisms by retortion. I have ever deemed it...

peace & prosperity are twin-brothers; so are war & demoralisation.

it is more a subject of joy that we have so few of the desperate characters which compose modern regular armies....

our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.