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The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three-headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three-headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
~ in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than no to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
~ in a letter to Abigail Adams, 1787)
I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
~ in a letter to James Madison after Shay’s rebellion
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is their natural manure.
~ in a letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
~ in a letter to Rutledge, 1795
I have said and always will say, that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.
~ Quoted by A.W. Pink in What Follows from Divine Inspiration
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others.
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever. (in reference to slavery)
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.
I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. ( in a letter to Rutledge, 1795)
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
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.
Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
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Abraham Lincoln’s Love Of Reading
The Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards
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Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
~ Karle Wilson Baker
It is a brave act of valour to contemn death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live.
~ Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici, section xliv
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use.
~ Ruth Gordon
Courage is grace under pressure.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Courage is not limited to the battlefield. The real tests of courage are much quieter. They are the inner tests, like enduring pain when the room is empty or standing alone when you’re misunderstood.
~ Charles Swindoll
Fortes fortuna adiuvat. [Fortune favours the brave.]
~ Terence, in Phormio
Bravery never goes out of fashion.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray, in The Four Georges
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Genius borrows nobly.
~ in Letters and Social Aims
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the hightest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto.
~ in Friendship
What you are speaks so loudly over your head that I cannot hear what you say.
~ Quoted by Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet 
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
All great men come out of the middle classes.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Common sense is genius dressed up in work clothes.
Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Every artist was first an amateur.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Skill to do comes of doing.
Tell me what a person believes and I’ll tell you what he’ll do.
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.
Unlovely, nay frightful, is the solitude of the soul without God in the world.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Without ambition, one starts nothing. Without work, one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.
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Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?
Even if you’re on the right road, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
I don’t make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts.
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
Fanaticism consist in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
~ in The Life of Reason
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ in The Life of Reason
History is alway written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
~ in The Life of Reason
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
Love makes us poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.
My proof convinces the ignorant, and the wise man’s proof convinces me. But he whose reasoning falls between wisdom and ignorance, I neither can convince him, nor can he convince me.
He brings disaster upon his nation who never sows a seed, or lays a brick, or weaves a garment, but makes politics his occupation.
The partition between the sage and the fool is more slender than the spider web.
Among the people there are killers who have not yet shed blood, and thieves who have stolen nothing, and liars who have so far told the truth.
Fear of the devil is one way of doubting God. Read more
A Statesman is a politician who is dead.
All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.
We live in a world of sin and sorrow, otherwise there would not be any Democratic Party.
