“A man with a rifle is a citizen; a man without one is merely a subject.”
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
“Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.”
“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
“Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle.”
“The difference between one man and another is not mere ability . . . it is energy.”