Historical voices

All those who have affections which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate, which has been produced from those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments…

If they had set up this new, experimental government as a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of prescription, which through long usage mellows into legality governments that were violent in…

I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary association of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state.

They must take it for granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all to their authority.

Those whose principle it is to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind, and to set up a scheme of society on new principles, must naturally expect that such of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than, of theirs…

We tolerate them, because property and liberty, to a degree, require that toleration.

We tolerate even these,--not from love of them, but for fear of worse.

In all the views of receipt, expenditure, and personal employment, a sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor whom he was recommended to expel with the stranger who was proposed to fill his place.

The only concern for the state is, that the capital taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the industry from whence it came, and that its expenditure should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of those who…

But this idleness is itself the spring of labor, this repose the spur to industry.

In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the immediate support of the producer.

They are the rival follies which mutually wage so unrelenting a war, and which make so cruel a use of their advantages, as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar, on the one side or the other, in their quarrels.

The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest.

You derive benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful a color, in the moral eye, as superstition itself.

But the institutions savor of superstition in their very principle; and they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence.--This I do not mean to dispute; but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any…

To destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material.

Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of Nature or of chance; her pride is in the use.

These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom.

A politician, to do great things, looks for a power, what our workmen call a purchase; and if he finds that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it.

There are moments in the fortune of states, when particular men are called to make improvements by great mental exertion.

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.