No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.
Interpretation
Censorship is a necessary part of governance, and freedom of the press ensures accountability.
Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the need for oversight in government through the concept of censorship, suggesting that a healthy press serves as the people's watchdog. He argues that in a truly free society, the presence of a vigilant and unrestricted media ensures that those in power are held accountable, effectively acting as a censor in its own right by informing the public and revealing truths that might otherwise be hidden.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about the importance of journalism in democracy.
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
βWe 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.
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.
There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a patter of systems.
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
Watch your thoughts as you watch the street traffic. People come and go; you register without response. It may not be easy in the beginning, but with some practice you will find that your mind can function on many levels at the same time and you can be aware of them all.
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