If, in the long years that have passed since we received your parting embrace, you have not had any earnest of my promise on that occasion, it is to be ascribed rather to the conviction that you already had more than a fair load of correspondence with our half of your double country, than to any...

the disease of liberty is catching: those armies will take it in the South, carry it thence to their own country spread there the infection of revolution & representative government, and raise it’s people from the prone condition of brutes to the erect attitude of man.

I am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.

I am constantly roving about, to see what I have never seen before and shall never see again

there can be no safer stock in the world deposit on earth than the treasury of the US.

but the only security of all is in a free press. the force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. the agitation it produces must be submitted to. it is necessary to keep the waters pure.

the boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never without a wave, and that from Missouri is now rolling towards us: but we shall ride over it as we have over all others. it is not a moral question, but one merely of power. it’s object is to raise a geographical principle for the choice of a...

ignorance & bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.

the cement of this union is in the heart blood of every American. I do not believe there is on earth a government established on so immovable a basis.

we are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.