Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs.
Interpretation
Government should not interfere in individual's religious beliefs.
This quote by Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the importance of separating church and state, suggesting that civil authorities should not involve themselves in the personal religious practices and beliefs of individuals. It reflects a fundamental principle of religious freedom and the idea that personal faith is a private matter that should not be governed or influenced by the state.
In practice
In a debate about the role of government in education, one might quote Jefferson to argue for religious neutrality.
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.
Give a drink of water as alms to the birds which go forth at morning, and deem that they have a better right than men [to thy charity]. For their race brings not harm upon thee in any wise, when thou fearest it from thine own race.
There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.
The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.
Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.
Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
We are living in a world of fear. The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear: fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself because it is fear, which drives men to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously.
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