wonderful is the effect of impudent & persevering lying.

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

Is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than face or stature ... Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advance one inch towards uniformity. What has been...

Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. [Query XVII, “Religion”]

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. [Query XVII, “Religion”]

The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subjects to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we...

all the states but our own are sensible that knolege is power. the Missouri question is for power. the efforts now generally making thro’ the states to advance their science is for power, while we are sinking into the barbarism of our Indian aborigines, and expect like them to oppose by ignorance...

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...

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

what is practicable must often controul what is pure theory; and the habits of the governed determine in a great degree what is practicable.