“To err is human, to repent divine; to persist devilish.”

“Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.”

“Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.”

“I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe in that He ought to be whipped from pilar to post and back again for His shameful actions toward Humanity.”

“You desire to know something of my Religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it: But I do not take your Curiosity amiss, and shall endeavour in a few Words to gratify it... I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his [Jesus'] divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.[Letter to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790]”

“All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.”

“Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart… To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty… and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted.[For the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1789]”