Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

A little rebellion now and then... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal.

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.

How much pain worries have cost us that have never happened?

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.