Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

I have no ambition to govern men it is a painful and thankless office.

It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.