The most fortunate of us all in our journey through life frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which greatly afflict us. To fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself.

Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none.

An occasional insurrection will not weigh against the inconveniences of a government of force, such as are monarchies and aristocracies.

By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.

I hope that we have not labored in vain, and that our experiment will still prove that men can be governed by reason.

We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.