A person of little ability and less character always could inflame a portion of the people when they could be assembled.

Nothing was too ridiculous for belief; nothing too absurd to be credited.

Such are examples of the strange tales fed to the voracious credulity of the multitude.

Things, praiseworthy in themselves, were magnified into stupendous and impending menaces.

Were the grotesque charges against these men the laurels with which democracy crowned those who had drawn the sword for freedom?

If there was not money enough, let the Government make more--what was a government for if not for that?

And if government could not make good money, what was the good of government?

Courts were fine examples of what government meant--they were always against the common people.

Let us have one by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once....

No morn ever dawned more favorably than ours did; and no day was ever more clouded than the present....

It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.

God forbid! we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion....

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.

In the United States general dislike and denunciation of the established governments had uncovered the feeling against government itself which lay at the root of opposition to any stronger one.

The so-called Federal Government was like a horse with thirteen bridle reins, each held in the hands of separate drivers who usually pulled the confused and powerless beast in different directions.

Congress could make treaties with foreign nations; but each of the States could and often did violate them at will.

Though debts were great and financial confusion maddening, they furnished no solid excuse for the failure of the States to enable Congress to preserve American honor by the payment of our admitted National debt.

I think there is more wickedness than ignorance mixed in our councils....

Look where one will among the class of men of whom Washington was the highest representative, one finds that they believed the fountain head of the country's desperate conditions to be in the people themselves.

But they thought that only a strong government could fashion the clay and breathe into its nostrils the breath of life.

It was the States which always were thwarting every plan for the general welfare; the States which were forever impairing the National obligations; the States which bound hand and foot the straw man of the central power, clothed it in rags…

And it was State pride, prejudice, and ignorance which gave provincial demagogues their advantage and opportunity.

The senseless and selfish nagging at trade in which the States indulged, after peace was declared, produced a brood of civil abuses as noisome as the military dangers which State control of troops had brought forth during the Revolution.

Our children see this and learn to imitate it....