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.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the tension between economic freedom and governmental control, suggesting that excessive debt leads to a loss of liberty.
Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the importance of balancing economic freedom with responsible governance. He warns that succumbing to debt can result in a loss of liberty, where citizens may end up paying for governmental inefficiencies with their toil and pleasures. Jefferson advocates for minimizing government waste in order to ensure the happiness of the people, implying that true freedom allows for individual agency rather than dependence on state intervention.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of fiscal responsibility in government.
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
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.
I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.
No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.
Man's actions are the picture book of his creeds.
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.
What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.