Thomas Jefferson

The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.

I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared

‎We must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.

Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.

A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

The past stays put, I just keep moving farther away from it.

The executive, in our government is not the sole, it is scarcely the principle, object of my jealousy. The tyranny of the legislature is the most formidable dread at present and will be for many years. That of the executive will come in its turn, but it will be at a remote period.

Our public credit is good, but the abundance of paper has produced a spirit of gambling in the funds, which has laid up our ships at the wharves as too slow instruments of profit, and has even disarmed the hand of the tailor of his needle and thimble. They say the evil will cure itself. I wish it may; but I have rarely seen a gamester cured, even by the disasters of his vocation.

I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented.

Excessive taxation . . . will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.

The reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.

Coffee - the favorite drink of the civilized world.

The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

We never repent of having eaten too little.

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.

I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.