Thomas Jefferson

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.

The most sacred of the duties of a government is to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.

In every country where man is free to think and to speak, differences of opinion will arise from the differences of their perceptions.

A people who are free, and who mean to remain so, must be armed.

I think myself that we are over-governed, and that the best government is that which governs least.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.

The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us.

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.

The democracy which I have been so long laboring to establish in Virginia has received its death-wound from the present session of Assembly.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute connection.

The people are the only censors of their governors.

Nothing can be so execrable as a government of military force.

The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the civil institutions of the people, have become a very formidable engine against the civil rights and liberties of man.

The only security against error is the freedom of inquiry.