Historical voices

The moneyed interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure, and its possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind.

In this state of real, though not always perceived, warfare between the noble ancient landed interest and the new moneyed interest, the greatest, because the most applicable, strength was in the hands of the latter.

By the vast debt of France a great moneyed interest has insensibly grown up, and with it a great power.

Reason can furnish nothing to reconcile inconsistency; nor can partial favor be accounted for upon equitable principles.

To mortgage the public revenue implies the sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse.

A pension, given as a reward for service to the state, is surely as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the state.

No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

He well knew that the public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can have no public estate, except in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens…

The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity.

These professors of the rights of men are so busy in teaching others, that they have not leisure to learn anything themselves; otherwise they would have known that it is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the…

Shall we not use the same liberty that they do, when we can use it with the same safety, when to speak honest truth only requires a contempt of the opinions of those whose actions we abhor?

Shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes?

The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful.

But to many minds this punishment of degradation and infamy is worse than death.

But to drive men from independence to live on alms is itself great cruelty.

Who but a tyrant (a name expressive of everything which can vitiate and degrade human nature) could think of seizing on the property of men, unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and thousands together?

I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the duties imposed upon us by the law of social union, as, upon any pretest of public service, to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen.

The robbery of your Church has proved a security to the possessions of ours.

Their language is in the patois of fraud, in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy.

Too much and too little are treason against property.

The world on the whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot exist.

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence.

We will have her mixed throughout the whole mass of life, and blended with all the classes of society.

Our provident Constitution has therefore taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous ignorance, those who are to be censors over insolent vice, should neither incur their contempt nor live upon their alms; nor will it tempt the…