Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.

A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.

The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.

Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.

The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

[the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.

No man can be a sound lawyer in this land who is not well read in the ethics of Moses and the virtues of Jesus.

The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.

I have heard it remarked that men are not to be reasoned out of an opinion they have not reasoned themselves into.

We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press...It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Believe me, you're going to have to do much worse than this--in the pursuit of freedom, the innocents will suffer--and at your hands.

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

Everyone dreams of driving a Ferrari, it was my intent fromthe start.

Governments without separation of powers commit the worst crimes.

You exist but as a part inherent in a greater whole. Do not live as though you had a thousand years before you. The common due impends; while you live, and while you may, be good.

Not everyone has a purpose.

If I'd wanted to be an individual, I'd have taken up tennis.

I've never believed in tying myself up in a long-range contract, and I've been very outspoken on that subject.

My lesson from that [songwriting process] was that I should go back to where I was and try to make that first pure even more strong.