"The freedom and happiness of man...[are] the sole objects of all legitimate government."

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."

"The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain."

"The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife."

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."

"The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys."

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive."

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

"We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience."

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."

"The duty of an upright administration is to pursue its course steadily, to know nothing of these family [dissensions], and to cherish the good principles of both parties."

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread."

"The foundation on which all [constitutions] are built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every preeminence but that annexed to legal office, and particularly the denial of a preeminence by birth."

"When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another."

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."