Thomas Jefferson

For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.

Without books, I would certainly die.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church.

Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.

Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself

Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

...We are all Federalists,and we are all Republicans.

If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear it off.

Resolved ... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism - free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.