"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none."

"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we are about to present to the world, of the practicability of a decent and republican government, and of maintaining it in…"

"The democracy which I have been so long laboring to establish in Virginia has received its death-wound from the present session of Assembly."

"I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master."

"The commerce of slaves in the West Indies, I am informed, is an open market of human flesh, where the unhappy victims are daily exposed to the highest bidder, and where the most sacred ties of nature …"