Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

Every word decides a question between power and liberty.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

I am unable to conceive that the state legislatures which must feel so many motives to watch, and which possess so many means of counteracting the federal legislature, would fail either to detect or to defeat a conspiracy of the latter against the liberties of their common constituencies.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.

The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.