Thomas Paine: “Did not this body know, that possessions are no more to be controuled than feelings are?”

It was a sort of new form of government that insensibly served to put the old one out of sight and to unhinge it from the superstitious authority of antiquity.

The American constitutions were to liberty what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax.

The Aristocracy had hitherto opposed the despotism of the Court, and affected the language of patriotism; but it opposed it as its rival (as the English Barons opposed King John) and it now opposed the nation from the same motives.

The object is not so much the produce of the tax as the justice of the measure.