Top 25 Quotes & Sayings by Ezra Stiles

Let a bill, or law, be read, in the one branch or the other, every one instantly thinks how it will affect his constituents.

Besides a happy policy as to civil government, it is necessary to institute a system of law and jurisprudence founded in justice, equity, and public right.

But a multitude of people, even the two hundred million of the Chinese empire, cannot subsist without civil government.

With the people, especially a people seized of property, resides the aggregate of original power.

But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.

The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade.

All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America.

It should seem, then, that the nature of society dictates another, a higher branch, whose superiority arises from its being the interested and natural conservator of the universal interest.

A monarchy conducted with infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence is the most perfect of all possible governments.

A few scattered accounts, collected and combined together, may lead us to two certain conclusions: 1. That all the American Indians are one kind of people; 2. That they are the same as the people in the northeast of Asia.

The greater part of the governments on earth may be termed monarchical aristocracies, or hereditary dominions independent of the people.

In justice to human society it may perhaps be said of almost all the polities and civil institutions in the world, however imperfect, that they have been founded in and carried on with very considerable wisdom.

We stand a better chance with aristocracy, whether hereditary or elective, than with monarchy.

It gives me pleasure to find that public liberty is effectually secured in each and all the policies of the United States, though somewhat differently modeled.

The right of conscience and private judgment is unalienable, and it is truly the interest of all mankind to unite themselves into one body for the liberty, free exercise, and unmolested enjoyment of this right.

There are reasons for believing that the English increase will far surpass others, and that the diffusion of the United States will ultimately produce the general population of America.

But Connecticut and Rhode Island have originally realized the most perfect polity as to a legislature.

Our trade opens to all the world.

The constitutions of Maryland and New York are founded in higher wisdom.

Let the grand errand into America never be forgotten.

Indians are numerous in the tropical regions; not so elsewhere.

The Lord shall have made his American Israel high above all nations which he hath made.

War, in some instances, especially defensive, has been authorized by Heaven.

All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America. Most of the states, of all ages ...have been founded in rapacity, usurpation, and injustice; so that in the contests recorded in history ...the military history of all nations being but a description of the wars and invasions of the mutual robbers and devastators of the human race.

The United States are under peculiar obligations to become a holy people unto the Lord our God.