thomas jefferson quotes freedom of speech

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The Founding Fathers of our limited government : Thomas Jefferson and the freedom of speech

This is the fifth in a five-part series dedicated to exploring the lives, ideas, and contributions of the five individuals most directly responsible for the founding of the United States. Without the courageous actions of James Madison , Benjamin Franklin , John Adams , George Washington , and Thomas Jefferson, America would not be the country that it is today. In Part Five, we discuss Thomas Jefferson and the foundation he laid for our freedom of speech .

July 4, 1776. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After several days of debate and revision, the Second Continental Congress voted to approve the final draft of the Declaration of Independence . Its author, Thomas Jefferson, was relieved his work passed this important test. But Jefferson almost didn’t write the words we all learned in our history classes. The five-man committee tasked with drafting the official statement breaking political ties with Great Britain had originally proposed John Adams to be its primary author.

But Adams insisted his friend, Jefferson, write the soon-to-be United States’ founding document. It was a wise choice.

The Declaration would form the basis for our American Republic and become the most eloquent and powerful statement of Enlightenment principles ever committed to parchment. Rather than simply listing their grievances, Jefferson produced a document that not only justified the new United States but also spelled out a theory of natural rights and the basis of a legitimate government.

Jefferson’s life of outspoken self-expression was nothing short of revolutionary. And Thomas Jefferson would help solidify our freedom of speech more than any other Founding Father.

Born in Shadwell, Virginia, on April 13, 1743, Jefferson’s formal education began when he was just five years old. Young Jefferson studied Latin, Greek, French, history, science, and the classics. When he was 16, he entered the College of William and Mary and studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy. The acquisition of knowledge and the art of effective communication became an obsession for Jefferson.

The commitment Thomas Jefferson had to freedom of speech would carry over to his later endeavors as a public servant. He was directly responsible for our First Amendment and the freedom of speech it protects. Jefferson was out of the country serving as ambassador to France when the Bill of Rights was being debated. But Jefferson regularly corresponded with James Madison and convinced the younger statesman to fight for such protections. The Supreme Court has even traced the language of the First Amendment directly to a bill previously introduced by Jefferson in the Virginia legislature.

Jefferson was also the leader of the new Democratic–Republican Party , one of the first two political parties in America. In this role, he would lead the vocal opposition to the fiscal policies of the Washington Administration led by Alexander Hamilton and the foreign policy of the Adams Administration regarding a possible war with France. No matter the political pressure or likely consequences, Jefferson stuck to his guns and spoke his mind.

One of Jefferson’s many influences on our fledgling Republic’s dedication to freedom of speech was his opposition to President John Adams’s enactment of the so-called “ Alien and Sedition Acts .” The French Revolution across the Atlantic Ocean threatened to tear the country apart, and Adams and the Federalists feared being drawn into the conflict. In addition to making it more difficult to become a citizen and allowing the president the power to detain “dangerous” foreign aliens, the legislation made it illegal to criticize the government.

The Sedition Act specifically outlawed conspiracies “to oppose any measure or measures of the government” and also outlawed publishing “any false, scandalous and malicious writing against Congress or the president.” These coercive laws resulted in more than a dozen indictments of newspaper editors, publishers, and even a Democratic–Republican congressman who wrote an article criticizing President Adams. Jefferson fought fervently against these violations of freedom of speech and a free press and subsequently defeated John Adams for president.

While a lot has changed since the 18th century, free speech issues continue to be a flashpoint for controversy. Since the Founding, the Supreme Court has increasingly recognized the importance of free speech to our society, both because of its importance to democratic deliberation and individual autonomy. The government can no longer lock you up for speaking your mind, but government’s still regularly try to control your ability to freely express yourself.

Speech restrictions and censorship are widespread across the United States. Despite progress in Minnesota , Texans are banned from voting at a polling place while wearing clothing considered too “political.” California banned photographing or taking video of falconry birds . And governments across the country prevent the marketing of products based on their content or with arduous requirements attached. But the First Amendment protects our freedom of speech despite what the government deems offensive or controversial.

These affronts to free speech go against what Jefferson and other Founders believed about our freedom of speech and expression. Pacific Legal Foundation and our allies fight on behalf of Americans’ right to speak their minds and express themselves, free from the threat of government sanction.

Jefferson once wrote, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Jefferson understood that, when it comes to expressing ourselves, whether it be in public or as a member of the media, we each have a right to speak without the government’s permission.

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Presidential Speeches

March 4, 1801: first inaugural address, about this speech.

Thomas Jefferson

March 04, 1801

FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS, Called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire. A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye -- when I contemplate these transcendent objects, and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking. Utterly, indeed, should I despair did not the presence of many whom I here see remind me that in the other high authorities provided by our Constitution I shall find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties. To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation, and to those associated with you, I look with encouragement for that guidance and support which may enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people -- a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it. Without pretensions to that high confidence you reposed in our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose preeminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country's love and destined for him the fairest page in the volume of faithful history, I ask so much confidence only as may give firmness and effect to the legal administration of your affairs. I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts. The approbation implied by your suffrage is a great consolation to me for the past, and my future solicitude will be to retain the good opinion of those who have bestowed it in advance, to conciliate that of others by doing them all the good in my power, and to be instrumental to the happiness and freedom of all.

Relying, then, on the patronage of your good will, I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make. And may that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.

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Thomas Jefferson: Quotes

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred. Thomas Jefferson

How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! Thomas Jefferson

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thomas Jefferson

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

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Thomas Jefferson

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread. Thomas Jefferson : Autobiography

The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of Heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind. Thomas Jefferson

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. Thomas Jefferson

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue. Thomas Jefferson

We never repent of having eaten too little. Thomas Jefferson

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. Thomas Jefferson

Delay is preferable to error. Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Thomas Jefferson

A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Thomas Jefferson

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. Thomas Jefferson : Notes on the State of Virginia

Jefferson’s preference for “newspapers without government” over “government without newspapers” (1787)

Found in: The Works, vol. 5 (Correspondence 1786-1789)

Jefferson writes from Paris to Edward Carrington, whom Jefferson sent as a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1786 to 1788, on the importance of a free press to keep government in check. He concludes that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”:

Freedom of Speech

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.

Jefferson constantly surprises the reader with his radical insights into the nature of government and his remedies to correct its abuses. In this letter written from Paris while he was Minister to France to Edward Carrington, whom he had appointed to represent the state of Virginia at the Continental Congress he makes two such insights: the first is the topic of the quotation, namely that he thinks the role of a free press in keeping government power in check is so important that he would prefer “newspapers without government” to “government without newspapers; the second is his statement about the nature of European governments (remember he is writing on the eve of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789), that they have divided the nation into two contending classes where the government were like wolves who devoured the wealth of the people, who were like sheep. Jefferson warns Carrington that all governments, even the new American government of which they themselves were members, unless checked by a knowledgeable citizenry, would inevitably become wolves.

Titles by Thomas Jefferson

January 16, 2015

Great American Thinkers on Free Speech

Notable quotes on the freedom of expression, a right that citizens of the U.S. have held dear for more than 200 years.

Post Editors

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You’ll find more notable quotes on the freedom of expression, a right U.S. citizens have held dear for more than 200 years, below:

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

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— Benjamin Franklin, U.S. Founding Father

“But none of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness and care by the settlers of America, than the press.”

— John Adams, second U.S. president

“The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.”

“If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”

— George Washington, first U.S. president

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

— Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Founding Father

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

— U.S. Constitution

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government: When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.”

“It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

— Louis D. Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court justice

“We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.”

— William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review magazine

“Of that freedom [of thought and speech] one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensible condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo, U.S. Supreme Court justice

“Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.”

— Henry Steele Commager, U.S. historian

“We cannot have a society half slave and half free; nor can we have thought half slave and half free. If we create an atmosphere in which men fear to think independently, inquire fearlessly, express themselves freely, we will in the end create the kind of society in which men no longer care to think independently or to inquire fearlessly.”

“The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say the things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which may convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.”

— Samuel Gompers, U.S. labor leader

“If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., U.S. Supreme Court justice

“We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear — unruly men, disturbers of the peace … in a word, free men. … Freedom is always purchased at a great price, and even those who are willing to pay it have to admit that the price is great.”

— Gerald W. Johnson, U.S. journalist

“Freedom of conscience, of education, or speech, of assembly are among the very fundamentals of democracy and all of them would be nullified should freedom of the press ever be successfully challenged.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd U.S. president

“You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply that you can have no wise laws nor free entertainment of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people — and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive.”

— William Allen White, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor

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We have already lost our freedoms. We have to be politically correct to say anything in fear of losing our jobs. Our freedom of religion is next with our churches closing because of the corona virus, which never should have been. People could have gone wearing masks and being careful. Now the Churches have lost many parishioners because they have been used to staying home and watching it on TV. Then there is Freedom of the Press; If you say anything critical of President Trump, it will be printed, but if it is for him then it is debatable if they will print it. The rite to assembly is supposed to be peaceful, but the violence is destroying our country, and our Governors are marching with them without masks even though they mandate that we should wear them! What happened to our freedoms? If and I say If the Democrats win this election then America with it’s freedoms are lost! WAKE UP AMERICA!!! GOD HELP US ALL!!!

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The first amendment, from jefferson to brandeis: the first amendment, the declaration, and the constitution.

These remarks were delivered by Jeffrey Rosen , president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, at a May 2, 2022, celebration of the newly installed marble First Amendment tablet , donated to the National Constitution Center by the Freedom Forum. Its design and installation was made possible through the generosity of Judge J. Michael Luttig and Elizabeth Luttig.

Speech Transcript

Thank you, Judge [J. Michael] Luttig, for your gift to America in bringing the First Amendment Tablet to Philadelphia. It’s fitting that the 45 words of the First Amendment will shine forever over Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted. As we prepare to dedicate the Tablet, let’s gaze together at Independence Hall and then turn our attention back to the words of the Tablet that are shining before us. Holding these two images in our minds is illuminating, because the First Amendment shows us the connection between the Declaration and the Constitution. It protects freedom of conscience, which the Founders considered first among the unalienable rights enshrined in the Preamble to the Declaration and first among the blessings of liberty enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution.

How do we know that the rights of conscience, as the Founders called them, were first among the unalienable rights and the blessings of liberty recognized by the Declaration and the Constitution? We know that from two other sacred texts I’d like to talk to you about now, as we dedicate the First Amendment Tablet together. Those text are Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, drafted in 1777, and Justice Brandeis’s opinion in Whitney v. California , drafted in 1927. 

Jefferson drafted his bill in Virginia months after he returned Philadelphia, where he had just completed the Declaration of Independence. He considered his Religious Freedom Bill among the three accomplishments of his life important enough to be inscribed on his tombstone, along with his having drafted the Declaration and founded the University of Virginia.

Under Virginia’s colonial religious code, all dissenters were required to support and attend the Established Anglican church. Presbyterians and Baptists could be arrested for practicing their faith or preaching the gospel. Quakers, Jews, and other dissenters could be denied the freedom to marry or to have custody of their children. Jefferson proposed not only to disestablish the Anglican Church and remove all criminal punishments for dissent, but also to prohibit all compelled support for religion of any kind. He concluded that because freedom of conscience is a fundamental right, government can regulate “overt acts against peace and good order,” but it lacks all power to “intrude into the field of opinion.”

Jefferson’s Bill sets out four reasons why government can make no law that constrains our freedom of speech, conscience, or opinion. Those four reasons were summed up by Justice Brandeis in Whitney, and they have been further developed by the Supreme Court since then:

1. Freedom of conscience is an unalienable right because people can only think for themselves;

2. Free speech makes representatives accountable to We the People;

3. Free speech is necessary for the discovery of truth and the rejection of falsehood;

4. Free speech allows the public discussion necessary for democratic self government.  

Let’s review each of Jefferson’s four reasons.

1. Freedom of conscience is an unalienable right

“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds,” Jefferson wrote in the first sentence of his draft, “God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint.” In other words, Jefferson argued, freedom of conscience is, by definition, an unalienable right – one that can’t be alienated or surrendered to government – because our opinions are the involuntary result of the evidence contemplated by our reasoning minds. We can’t give presidents, priests, teachers, or fellow citizens the power to think for us, even if we wanted to, because we are endowed as human beings with the capacity to reason and therefore can’t help thinking for ourselves. We know that Madison, the drafter of the First Amendment, shared Jefferson’s views because he echoed them in his Memorial and Remonstrance in 1785, which persuaded the Virginia legislature to pass Jefferson’s bill. The rights of conscience are “unalienable,” Madison wrote, “because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men.”

2. Free speech makes representatives accountable to We the People.

In his Religious Freedom Bill, Jefferson emphasized that it’s crucial in a democracy for citizens to be able to criticize public officials because legislators and religious leaders, “being themselves fallible and uninspired,” will always try to impose “their own opinions and modes of thinking” on others. His prediction came to a head in the controversy of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, where the Federalist Congress made it a crime to criticize the Federalist President, John Adams, but not the Republican Vice President, Thomas Jefferson. And Madison, once again, echoed Jefferson’s views in his Virginia Resolution, which said the Sedition Act “ought to produce universal alarm, because it is levelled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures” which is “the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

3. Free speech is necessary for the discovery and spread of political truth.  

Jefferson concludes his Religious Freedom Bill with words expressing his unshakeable faith in the power of reasoned deliberation to distinguish truth from error, words that are inscribed in marble on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington: “truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.”

4. Free speech allows the public discussion necessary for democratic self-government.

Jefferson believed that in a democracy, all citizens have an equal right and responsibility to exercise their rights of conscience. As Jefferson put it in his Virginia Bill, “proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.”

On the Supreme Court, in the greatest free speech opinion of the twentieth century, Justice Louis Brandeis distilled Jefferson’s four reasons for protecting free speech into a few inspiring paragraphs. In the case, Whitney v. California , we see the first Jewish Justice insisting on the right of Anita Whitney, a white woman, to make a speech defending anti-lynching laws, which were designed to protect the life and liberty of African Americans. Whitney made her speech at a Communist Party meeting, and she was convicted under a California law that made it a crime to associate with organizations that advocated doctrines that might lead to people to break the law. In 1926, Brandeis had read Jefferson’s original draft of the Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. In his Whitney opinion in 1927, Brandeis adopted and refined Jefferson’s standard for ensuring that government could only punish overt acts of lawbreaking, not the expression of dangerous opinions.

As Brandeis put it in Whitney , “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. [And] There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent.”

Brandeis’s inspiring test – government can ban speech only if it’s intended to and likely to cause imminent and serious injury – was based on his Jeffersonian faith in the power of what he called “free and fearless reasoning” to expose falsehood through public discussion. As Brandeis put it, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression.” Brandeis’s test was finally adopted by the Supreme Court in 1969. As a result, the United States Supreme Court now protects free speech more vigorously than any other judiciary in the world.

Brandeis went on to summarize Jefferson’s four reasons for why government cannot make laws designed to restrict what Jefferson called “the illimitable freedom of the human mind.” And in the process he achieved a kind of constitutional poetry. I will now read Brandeis’s central passage – listen closely for each of Jefferson’s four reasons: freedom of conscience, democratic accountability, discovery of truth, and democratic self-government.

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. [That’s a quotation from Pericles funeral oration]. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

But as this paragraph shows, all four of Jefferson and Brandeis’s reasons for protecting free speech are based on an Enlightenment faith in reason itself. The First Amendment is based on a faith that people will take the time to develop their faculties of reason, through education and public discussion; that public deliberation will check arbitrary and partisan demagogues rather than enable them; that more speech will lead to the spread of more truth rather than more falsehood; and that people will, in fact, take time for discussion and deliberation, rather than make impulsive decisions. 

This founding faith in reason is being questioned in our polarized age of social media. Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms are based on a business model that’s now being called “enrage to engage.” They have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace. For these reasons, some are calling for America’s free speech tradition to be reconsidered or abandoned.

Here at the National Constitution Center, by contrast, we are proud to reaffirm the faith in reasoned deliberation by consecrating the 45 words that will shine forever in this hallowed space. As a vital platform for non partisan education and debate, we bring together Americans of different perspectives to cultivate their faculties of reason. Only by listening to the best arguments on all sides of the constitutional questions at the center of American life can all of us exercise our right and duty to make up our own minds. Like Jefferson and Brandeis and Frederick Douglass and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all of the great free speech heroes of America history, we are dedicated to preserving, protecting, and defending what Jefferson called “the illimitable freedom of the human mind.” May the shining words of the First Amendment Tablet inspire future generations with this self-evident truth: reason will always combat error as long as individuals are free to follow the dictates of conscience wherever it boldly leads. On behalf of all of us at the National Constitution Center, thanks again to Jan Neuharth and Judge Luttig for making this memorable ceremony possible, and thanks to all of you for joining us.

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I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery (Quotation)

"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery" is a translation of a Latin phrase that Thomas Jefferson used: " Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem ." It has also been translated as, "I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude."

Jefferson used the Latin phrase in the following letter to  James Madison :

Societies exist under three forms sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments wherein the will of every one has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states in a great one. 3. Under governments of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the 1st. condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has it's evils too: the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem . Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. 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. - Jefferson to Madison, January 30, 1787 [1]

[Note: Jefferson did not bold the above quote]

Read Jefferson's full January 30, 1787 letter to James Madison

• ^ PTJ , 11:92-93.  Letterpress copy  available online at  Thomas Jefferson Papers , Library of Congress.  Transcription  available at Founders Online.

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100 Best Thomas Jefferson Quotes On Freedom, Life And Education

Thomas jefferson was a statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, prolific author and founding father who served as the third leader of the united states from 1801 to 1809. he previously served as the second vp of the united states between 1797 and 1801 also, the principal author of the ‘declaration of independence’. let’s read some of the best thomas jefferson quotes:, thomas jefferson quotes, 1 – “too old to plant trees for my own gratification, i shall do it for my posterity.” , 2 – “war is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”, 3 – “i do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and i feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”, 4 – “only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.”, 5 – “good wine is a necessity of life for me.”, 6 – “honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”, 7 – “i’m a greater believer in luck, and i find the harder i work the more i have of it.”, 8 – “if you want something you’ve never had you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”, 9 – “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.”, 10 – “one man with courage is a majority.”, 11 – “take care of your cents: dollars will take care of themselves.”, 12 – “i like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”, 13 – “the art of life is the art of avoiding pain.”, 14 – “the happiest moments of my life have been the few which i have passed at home in the bosom of my family.”, 15 – “he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time.”, 16 – “i prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”, 17 – “every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”, 18 – “when angry count to ten before you speak. if very angry, count to one hundred.”, 19 – “never put off to tomorrow what you can do today.”, 20 – “do you want to know who you are don’t ask. act action will delineate and define you.”, 21 – “when you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”, 22 – “be polite to all, but intimate with few.”, 23 – “i was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led.”, 24 – “don’t talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.”, 25 – “i predict future happiness for americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people under the pretence of taking care of them.”, 25 out of 100 best quotes by thomas jefferson , 26 – “the most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”, 27 – “never buy a thing you do not want, because it is cheap, it will be dear to you.”, 28 – “he who knows best knows how little he knows.”, 29 – “how much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.”, 30 – “our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.”, 31 – “there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.”, 32 – “i find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.”, 33 – “truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.”, 34 – “it is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing than to believe what is wrong.”, 35 – “happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.”, 36 – “whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.”, 37 – “the god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.”, 38 – “the glow of one warm thought is to be worth more than money.”, 39 – “it is error alone which needs the support of the government. truth can stand by itself.”, 40 – “determine never to be idle. no person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. it is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”, 41 – “do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.”, 42 – “a coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”, 43 – “there is not a truth existing which i fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.”, 44 – “he who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”, 45 – “my only fear is that i may live too long. this would be a subject of dread to me.”, 46 – “there is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.”, 47 – “never spend your money before you have earned it.”, 48 – “in matters of style swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”, 49 – “i hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”, 50 – “educate and inform the whole mass of the people… they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”, 50 out of 100 thomas jefferson quotes, you may also watch alexander the great quote s – , 51 – “walking is the best possible exercise. habituate yourself to walk very far.”, 52 – “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”, 53 – “no freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.”, 54 – “where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”, 55 – “i never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as a cause for withdrawing from a friend.”, 56 – “leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.”, 57 – “but friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.”, 58 – “the boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.”, 59 – “the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”, 60 – “nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.”, 61 – “peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and i wish we may be permitted to pursue it.”, 62 – “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god.”, 63 – “nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”, 64 – “leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. i will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.”, 65 – “an injured friend is the bitterest of foes.”, 66 – “power is not alluring to pure minds.”, 67 – “i tremble for my country when i reflect that god is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”, 68 – “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”, 69 – “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”, 70 – “one travels more usefully when alone because he reflects more.”, 71 – “every citizen should be a soldier. this was the case with the greeks and romans, and must be that of every free state.”, 72 – “i cannot live without books.”, 73 – “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. i do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because the law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”, 74 – “the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.”, 75 – “experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”, 75 out of 100 thomas jefferson inspirational quotes, 76 – “it takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.”, 77 – “for a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.”, 78 – “no occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”, 79 – “i believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.”, 80 – “the most successful war seldom pays for its losses.”, 81 – “friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another”, 82 – “my theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.”, 83 – “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”, 84 – “it is neither wealth nor splendour, but tranquillity and occupation which give you happiness.”, 85 – “commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”, 86 – “we confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.”, 87 – “a little rebellion is good now and then.”, 88 – “i am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which i have no evidence.”, 89 – “it is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.”, 90 – “as our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.”, 91 – “i have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”, 92 – “every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. for not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. and were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.”, 93 – “i never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”, 94 – “taste cannot be controlled by law.”, 95 – “never trust a man who won’t accept that there is more than one way to spell a word paraphrased.”, 96 – “i find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.”, 97 – “the opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.”, 98 – “money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.”, 99 – “wisdom i know is social. she seeks her fellows. but beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.”, 100 “advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”, 100 out of 100 thomas jefferson quotes, you may also like ~  100 best benjamin franklin quotes and thoughts, leave a comment cancel reply.

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Thomas Jefferson

Carol Walker-Russell

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, articulated and perpetuated the American ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, press, and conscience. He supported the Bill of Rights and even wrote a precursor to the First Amendment. (Painting by Rembrandt Peale, Public domain)

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), author of the  Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, articulated and perpetuated the American ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, press and conscience.

Jefferson had law and political background

Jefferson was born in Goochland (now Albemarle) County, Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, died in 1757 when Thomas was only 14. Thomas inherited 5,000 acres and many slaves. He attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from 1760 to 1762, but left without a degree.

After studying law under prominent Virginia lawyer and judge George Wythe, Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767. In 1769 he began a six-year tenure in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

Jefferson wrote Declaration of Independence in three days

In 1776, one year after he entered the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson, now 33, was one of five members selected to draft the Declaration of Independence . Following the lead of John Adams , the committee unanimously selected Jefferson to write the document, which he did over the course of three days. The Continental Congress then amended the Declaration and ratified it on July 4, 1776.

The Declaration of Independence is best known for articulating the  natural rights philosophy that all people (“men”) are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that they have the right to reject any government that does not secure such rights.

As he did throughout his life, Jefferson strongly believed that every American should have the right to prevent the government from infringing on the liberties of its citizens. Certain liberties, including those of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition, should be sacred to everyone.

Thomas Jefferson wanted the new Constitution to be accompanied by a written “bill of rights” to guarantee personal liberties, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from standing armies, trial by jury, and habeas corpus. Jefferson’s correspondence with James Madison helped to convince Madison to introduce a bill of rights into the First Congress. After ratification by the requisite number of states, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, went into effect in 1791. (Image via Cliff on Flickr, CC BY 2.0, painted in 1786)

Jefferson wanted Bill of Rights for Constitution

Jefferson was serving as ambassador to France when the  Constitutional Convention  met in 1787 to replace the Articles of Confederation, but he remained well informed about events in America, largely because of his correspondence with his good friend  James Madison .

Jefferson recognized that a stronger federal government would make the country more secure economically and militarily, but he feared that a strong central government might become too powerful, restricting citizens’ rights.

He therefore wanted the new Constitution to be accompanied by a written “bill of rights” to guarantee personal liberties, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from standing armies, trial by jury, and habeas corpus. Jefferson’s correspondence with James Madison helped to convince Madison to introduce a bill of rights into the First Congress . After ratification by the requisite number of states, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights , went into effect in 1791.

Jefferson drafted a precursor bill to the First Amendent

In  Everson v. Board of Education (1947) ,  Justice Hugo L. Black  and some of his colleagues on the Supreme Court traced the origins of the First Amendment to a bill establishing religious freedom that Jefferson drafted and introduced in the Virginia General Assembly in 1779. The bill was not passed until 1786, when, through the efforts of James Madison, it was adopted as the  Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom .

The statute, which had three main sections, explained why compulsory religion requirements were wrong, stated that men were free to express their opinions on religion and choose how or if to worship without having their rights as citizens diminished, and explained how the right of freedom of religion was a natural right of mankind.

Justices on the Supreme Court traced the origins of the First Amendment to a bill establishing religious freedom that Jefferson drafted and introduced in the Virginia General Assembly in 1779. The bill was not passed until 1786, when, through the efforts of James Madison, it was adopted as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. (Image via Independence National Historical Park on Wikimedia Commons, public domain, painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1791)

Jefferson was a defender of freedom of conscience

Meanwhile, Jefferson’s own religious views appear to have been fairly unorthodox (for example, he attempted to edit references to miracles out of the Bible), and he was a strong defender of freedom of conscience.

During his presidency, Jefferson wrote a much-quoted letter to Baptists  in Danbury, Connecticut, arguing that the First Amendment had created a  wall of separation  between church and state.

Jefferson opposed punishing speech through Sedition Act

Jefferson demonstrated his strong support for the First Amendment during the presidency of  John Adams , a member of the  Federalist Party . Jefferson belonged to the rival party, known variously as the Republican Party, Democratic-Republican Party, or Jeffersonian-Republican Party.

In 1798 the Federalist-dominated Congress passed the Alien Act, which allowed the president to deport any noncitizens he considered to be a threat to national security . That same year, Congress also passed the Sedition Act , which allowed the imposition of fines or imprisonment for anyone convicted of publishing false or malicious statements against Congress, the president, or any other part of the government.

Thomas Jefferson thought the Alien and Sedition Acts to be clear violations of the freedoms of speech and the press guaranteed in the First Amendment.(Image via the New York Historical Society on Wikimedia Commons, public domain, painted by Rembrandt Peale in 1805)

Jefferson thought the Alien and Sedition Acts to be clear violations of the freedoms of speech and the press guaranteed in the First Amendment. In his mind, the acts were created simply to undermine his political party.

In response, he and Madison anonymously wrote the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 , strongly suggesting that the federal government was overstepping the boundaries set forth not only in the First Amendment but also in the 10th Amendment, which reserved certain powers to the states.

In part because of these arguments, Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800 (resolved in 1801) and became the third chief executive of the United States. As president, Jefferson pardoned all those persons who had been convicted under the Sedition Act.

Before ascending to the presidency, Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, from 1779 to 1781, and secretary of state under  President George Washington , from 1789 to 1793. As secretary of state, he often feuded with  Alexander Hamilton , the first Secretary of the Treasury. Jefferson, who preferred to use the pen as his primary means of attack, was quite sensitive to criticism.

In 1796, Jefferson lost the presidential election to Adams by three electoral votes, an outcome that under the Constitution earned him the vice presidency. In the election of 1800, Jefferson tied in electoral votes with fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr, thereby forcing the House of Representatives to decide the outcome of the election. Hamilton disliked both men, but he supported Jefferson as the lesser of the two evils. In the end, Burr became Jefferson’s vice president.

After he left the presidency, Jefferson returned to his Virginia home, Monticello (pictured here), to pursue his numerous intellectual passions. On July 4, 1826, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello. (Image via Martin Falbisoner on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

As president, Jefferson tried to keep a weak national government 

During his two terms in office, Jefferson sought to stay true to his principles of a weak national government by cutting the federal budget and taxes while still reducing the national debt. However, the most notable events of Jefferson’s presidency may seem to be at odds with these values.

They included:

• The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 in which Jefferson, in a constitutionally questionable act, approved the purchase before Congress authorized payment; 
• The Jefferson-supported Embargo Act of 1807, which effectively prohibited all U.S. trade with other nations; and
• The Lewis and Clark expedition, which made many scientific discoveries while exploring the Louisiana Territory, which the nation had just purchased. 

Critics charged that Jefferson exceeded the powers granted to him in the Constitution by engaging in these activities.

Jefferson dies on July 4, 1826 — 50 years after Declaration

After he left the presidency, Jefferson returned to his Virginia home, Monticello, to pursue his numerous intellectual passions. On July 4, 1826, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello. His former adversary and friend John Adams died the same day. After his death, Jefferson’s possessions were sold at auction at Monticello to cover his many debts.

At his request, Jefferson’s proudest accomplishments were listed on his gravestone: author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. Each was tied to his conception of freedom. The most lasting legacies of this complex man are the contributions he made to articulating American ideals and leading the nation during its early years.

This article was originally published in 2009. Carol Walker is an adjunct professor at George Mason University where she teaches about the First Amendment in courses on civil liberties, civil rights, and the Constitution. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science with concentrations in American Government, Public Law, and Research Methods from Georgia State University.

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Thomas Jefferson Quotes About Freedom And Liberty

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

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

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

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.

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.

I have sworn upon the altar of God Eternal, hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

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

When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

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Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson ( 13 April 1743 – 4 July 1826 ) was author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777), founder of the University of Virginia (1819), the third president of the United States (1801–1809), a political philosopher, editor of Jefferson's Bible (1819), and one of the most influential founders of the United States .

• 1.2.1 A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
• 1.2.2.1 Earlier drafts
• 1.3.1 Letter to George Rogers Clark (1780)
• 1.3.2 Notes on the State of Virginia
• 1.3.3 Letter to the Marquis de Chastellux (1785)
• 1.3.4 Letter to Richard Price (1785)
• 1.3.5 Letter to Peter Carr (1785)
• 1.3.6 Letter to John Jay (1786)
• 1.3.7 Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph (1787)
• 1.3.8 Letter to Edward Rutledge (1787)
• 1.3.9 Letter to Peter Carr (1787)
• 1.3.10 Letter to James Madison (1787)
• 1.4.1 Kentucky Resolutions of 1798
• 1.5.1 First Inaugural Address (1801)
• 1.5.2 First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)
• 1.5.3 Second Inaugural Address (1805)
• 1.5.4 Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)
• 1.5.5 Post-Presidency (1809)
• 1.6.1 Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)
• 1.6.2 Letter to Isaac McPherson (1813)
• 1.6.3 Letter to Edward Coles (1814)
• 1.6.4 Letter to Joseph Milligan (6 April 1816)
• 1.6.5 Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)
• 1.6.6 Letter to Albert Gallatin (16 June 1817)
• 1.7.1 Letter to A. Coray (1823)
• 1.7.2 Letter to Frances Wright (1825)
• 1.8.1 On financial matters
• 1.8.2 On botany
• 2 Attributed
• 4 Misattributed
• 6 Primary sources
• 8 External links

• Letter to John Page (15 July 1763); published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson (1905)
• Vol. 1 Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law (1764) Broken link . Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, p. 459

• Letter to Robert Skipwith (3 August 1771)  ; also in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 4, p. 239
• A Summary View of the Rights of British America (July 1774)
• Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774); The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 1, p. 211
• Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
• Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (1775); Jefferson composed the first draft of this document, but the final work was done by John Dickinson , working with his original draft. Full text online
• Draft Constitution for Virginia (June 1776)
• Draft Constitution for Virginia (June 1776) This quote often appears with the parenthetical omitted and with the spurious extension, "The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government". (See "No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms" Quotation ( Archived from the original on February 20, 2020) and Jefferson Encyclopedia "Strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms" Quotation ( Archived from the original on February 20, 2020))
• Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson : 1816–1826 (1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 2, p. 102
• Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2 , p. 256
• Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2 , p. 266
• Notes on Religion (October, 1776). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2 , pp. 267
• A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom , Chapter 82 (1779). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 1 , pp. 438–441. Comparison of Jefferson's proposed draft and the bill enacted

A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)

• History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.
• There are extraordinary situations which require extraordinary interposition. An exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular.
• When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution.
• From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation. The feelings of human nature revolt against the supposition of a state so situated as that it may not in any emergency provide against dangers which perhaps threaten immediate ruin. While those bodies are in existence to whom the people have delegated the powers of legislation, they alone possess and may exercise those powers; but when they are dissolved by the lopping off one or more of their branches, the power reverts to the people, who may exercise it to unlimited extent, either assembling together in person, sending deputies, or in any other way they may think proper.
• From the nature and purpose of civil institutions, all the lands within the limits which any particular society has circumscribed around itself are assumed by that society, and subject to their allotment only. This may be done by themselves, assembled collectively, or by their legislature, to whom they may have delegated sovereign authority; and if they are alloted in neither of these ways, each individual of the society may appropriate to himself such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy will give him title.
• A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate .
• Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.
• The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.
• The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.

Declaration of Independence (1776)

• When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
• And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Earlier drafts

• Known as the "anti-slavery clause", this section drafted by Thomas Jefferson was removed from the Declaration at the behest of representatives of South Carolina .
• Article No. 20

• 1782, reported in Henry Brougham, Baron Brougham and Vaux, Historical Sketches of Statesmen who Flourished in the Time of George III (1845), Vol. II, p. 62.
• Letter to John Jay (23 August 1785); published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1953), edited by Julian P. Boyd, vol. 8, p. 426
• Letter to François-Jean de Chastellux (September 2, 1785). archives.gov Also quoted in Thomas Jefferson, Writings , ed. Merrill D. Peterson (1984), p. 827
• Letter to James Madison (28 October 1785)
• “From Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 28 October 1785,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-08-02-0534 . [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 8, 25 February–31 October 1785, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, pp. 681–683.]
• Letter to George Washington (4 January 1786)
• Letter to Jean Nicholas Demeunier (24 January 1786) Bergh 17:103
• Letter to John Jay from Paris, France (January 25, 1786). Source: “ From Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 25 January 1786 ,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9, 1 November 1785 – 22 June 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, p. 215.]
• Letter to Dr. James Currie (28 January 1786) Lipscomb & Bergh 18:ii
• Letter from the commissioners (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson) to John Jay , 28 March 1786, in Thomas Jefferson Travels: Selected Writings, 1784-1789 , by Anthony Brandt, pp. 104-105
• Letter to Benjamin Hawkins (13 August 1786) Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 5:390
• Letter to M. L'Hommande, (1787), as quoted in The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia (1900), edited by John P. Foley, p. 500
• Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787) Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:57
• Compare letter to John Norvell (11 June 1807), below.
• Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787)
• Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, Paris, (16 January 1787)
• Letter to James Madison (30 January 1787); referring to Shays' Rebellion Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:65
• Letter to Abigail Smith Adams from Paris while a Minister to France (22 February 1787), referring to Shay's Rebellion. "Jefferson's Service to the New Nation," Library of Congress
• Letter to David Hartley (2 July 1787)
• Letter to the Abbé Arnoux (19 July 1787)
• Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787). Manuscript at the Library of Congress .
• Letter to James Madison (20 December 1787), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. VI, p. 392.
• Letter to James Madison, Paris, (20 December 1787), The Political Writings Of Thomas Jefferson , Dumbauld, Edit. (1955) pp. 67-68
• Letter to Mr. Dumas (12 February 1788)
• Letter to Alexander Donald (7 February 1788)
• Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (27 May 1788) ME 7:36
• Letter to Edward Carrington, Paris (27 May 1788)
• Hints to Americans travelling in Europe, letter to John Rutledge, Jr. (June 19, 1788); in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson , ed. Julian P. Boyd (1956), vol. 13, p. 269
• Letter From Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. James Madison, 19 July 1788
• Letter to James Madison (July 31, 1788); reported in Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of Thomas Jefferson , Volumes 1-2 (1829), p. 343
• Letter to Richard Price (8 January 1789)
• Letter to Francis Hopkinson (13 March 1789)
• Letter to James Madison , (6 September 1789)
• Letter to James Madison (6 September 1789) ME 7:455, Papers 15:393

Letter to George Rogers Clark (1780)

• We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace... we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends.

Notes on the State of Virginia

• Query XIII, pp. 126–127
• Query XIV, p. 147
• Query XIV, pp. 147–148
• Query XIV, pp. 149, 151–152
• Query XIV, pp. 153–154
• Query XVII, p. 169
• Query XVII, pp. 169–170
• Query XVII, pp. 170–171
• Query XVIII, pp. 173–174; for more quotes from this document see: Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1785)

Letter to the Marquis de Chastellux (1785)

• I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.

Letter to Richard Price (1785)

• Benjamin Wade speech about Jefferson's letter about Price's work Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution as quoted in the Congressional Record, 1854, pp. 312-313 [1]
• Wade, ibid.

Letter to Peter Carr (1785)

• As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you.
• The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk; but divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man; but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much, the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse; and he will tire the best horses. There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.
• He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Letter to John Jay (1786)

• We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.
• Concerning an interview in London with the ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja.

Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph (1787)

• With respect to modern languages, French, as I have before observed, is indispensible. Next to this the Spanish is most important to an American. Our connection with Spain is already important and will become daily more so. Besides this the antient part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish.

Letter to Edward Rutledge (1787)

• I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.

Letter to Peter Carr (1787)

• He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.
• The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.
• Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, &c. Consider every act of this kind, as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.
• Scan of the original page at The Library of Congress.
• You will naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then as you would read Livy or Tacitus . The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature, you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy and Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor, in one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature, does not weigh against them. But those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong, as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature, in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine therefore candidly what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature that a body revolving on its axis as the earth does, should have stopped, should not by that sudden stoppage have prostrated animals, trees, buildings, and should after a certain time have resumed its revolution, & that without a second general prostration. Is this arrest of the earth's motion, or the evidence which affirms it, most within the law of probabilities?
• You will next read the new testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus . Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions 1. of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended & reversed the laws of nature at will, & ascended bodily into heaven: and 2. of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, & was Punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, & the second by exile or death in furcâ .
• Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love.
• In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.
• When speaking of the new testament that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, & not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some however still extant, collected by Fabricius which I will endeavor to get & send you.

Letter to James Madison (1787)

• I will therefore make up the deficiency by adding a few words on the Constitution proposed by our Convention. I like much the general idea of framing a government which should go on of itself peaceably, without needing continual recurrence to the state legislatures. I like the organization of the government into Legislative , Judiciary and Executive. I like the power given the Legislature to levy taxes; and for that reason solely approve of the greater house being chosen by the people directly. For tho’ I think a house chosen by them will be very illy qualified to legislate for the Union, for foreign nations &c. yet this evil does not weigh against the good of preserving inviolate the fundamental principle that the people are not to be taxed but by representatives chosen immediately by themselves. I am captivated by the compromise of the opposite claims of the great and little states, of the latter to equal, and the former to proportional influence. I am much pleased too with the substitution of the method of voting by persons, instead of that of voting by states: and I like the negative given to the Executive with a third of either house, though I should have liked it better had the Judiciary been associated for that purpose, or invested with a similar and separate power.
• There are other good things of less moment. I will now add what I do not like. First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion , freedom of the press , protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of Nations. To say, as Mr. Wilson does that a bill of rights was not necessary because all is reserved in the case of the general government which is not given, while in the particular ones all is given which is not reserved might do for the Audience to whom it was addressed, but is surely gratis dictum, opposed by strong inferences from the body of the instrument, as well as from the omission of the clause of our present confederation which had declared that in express terms. It was a hard conclusion to say because there has been no uniformity among the states as to the cases triable by jury, because some have been so incautious as to abandon this mode of trial, therefore the more prudent states shall be reduced to the same level of calamity. It would have been much more just and wise to have concluded the other way that as most of the states had judiciously preserved this palladium, those who had wandered should be brought back to it, and to have established general right instead of general wrong. Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
• The second feature I dislike, and greatly dislike, is the abandonment in every instance of the necessity of rotation in office, and most particularly in the case of the President . Experience concurs with reason in concluding that the first magistrate will always be re-elected if the constitution permits it. He is then an officer for life. This once observed it becomes of so much consequence to certain nations to have a friend or a foe at the head of our affairs that they will interfere with money and with arms. A Galloman or an Angloman will be supported by the nation he befriends. If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the states voting for him, especially if they are the central ones lying in a compact body themselves and separating their opponents: and they will be aided by one nation of Europe, while the majority are aided by another. The election of a President of America some years hence will be much more interesting to certain nations of Europe than ever the election of a king of Poland was. Reflect on all the instances in history antient and modern, of elective monarchies, and say if they do not give foundation for my fears, the Roman emperors, the popes, while they were of any importance, the German emperors till they became hereditary in practice, the kings of Poland, the Deys of the Ottoman dependancies. It may be said that if elections are to be attended with these disorders, the seldomer they are renewed the better. But experience shews that the only way to prevent disorder is to render them uninteresting by frequent changes. An incapacity to be elected a second time would have been the only effectual preventative. The power of removing him every fourth year by the vote of the people is a power which will not be exercised. The king of Poland is removeable every day by the Diet, yet he is never removed.
• After all, it is my principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail.

• Letter to William Hunter (11 March 1790)
• Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (2 April 1790)
• Letter to a Mr. Hazard (18 February 1791) published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853), Vol. 2, edited by Henry Augustine Washington, p. 211
• Opinion against the constitutionality of a National Bank (1791), also quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 3, p. 146
• Letter to his Italian friend, Philip Mazzei (1796)
• Letter to Benjamin Banneker (30 August 1791) , quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853), p. 291
• Letter to Archibald Stuart [2] [3] , Philadelphia (23 December 1791)
• Letter to William Short (18 March 1792)
• Letter to George Washington (16 May 1792)
• Letter to George Washington (9 September 1792)
• Letter to William Short (January 3, 1793), quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1995), pp. 316–317
• Letter to William Carmichael and William Short (1793)
• Letter to George Washington (1796); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., (1903-04), 9:341
• Letter to Elbridge Gerry (13 May 1797)
• Letter to Arthur Campbell (1797)
• From a letter to John Taylor (June 1798), after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
• Letter to John Sinclair (1798)
• Statement about Tadeusz Kościuszko , in a letter to Horatio Gates (1798)
• Letter to Elbridge Gerry (26 January 1799); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , Memorial Edition 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 10, p. 78
• Letter to Thomas Lomax (12 March 1799)
• Letter to William Green Mumford (18 June 1799)

Kentucky Resolutions of 1798

• Resolution 9

• The Anas (February 1, 1800). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 1 , pp. 352–353
• On members of the clergy who sought to establish some form of "official" Christianity in the U.S. government. Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush (23 September 1800)
• This has commonly been quoted as " I have sworn upon the altar of God Eternal, hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man ", "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" , and " I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. " Neither capitalization of "god" and "eternal", nor a comma before or after "eternal" are apparent in the original. Photograph of the original manuscript at the Library of Congress - LOC transcription
• The first portion of this statement has also been widely paraphrased as "The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes, and they believe rightly".
• Writings (1904), Vol. XI, p. 44, to Abigail Adams on July 22, 1804.
• Letter to the Young Republicans of Pittsburg (December 2, 1808); H. A. Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , vol. 8, p. 142 (1871). Source: Library of Congress (February 18, 2010): Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations, page 162 . Published by ‎Dover Publications.

First Inaugural Address (1801)

• All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.
• Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans , we are all Federalists .
• If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
• I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope , may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.
• Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
• With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens,— A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government , and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
• About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people -- a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus , and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.
• I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.
• I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts .
• I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make .

First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

• Letter to Dr. Joseph Priestley (21 March 1801); published in The Life of Thomas Jefferson (1871) by Henry Stephens Randall, Vol. 2, p. 644; this seems to be the source of a misleading abbreviation: "[Christianity is] the most ... perverted system that ever shone on man".
• Letter to William Findley, Washington (21 March 1801); published in Thomas Jefferson - A chronology of his thoughts (2002) by Jerry Holmes, p. 175
• Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Paraphrased in John B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States (ii. 586): "One sentence will undoubtedly be remembered till our republic ceases to exist. 'No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying,' [Jefferson] observed, 'as to put the right man in the right place.'"
• Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Often misquoted as, "few die and none resign".
• Thomas Jefferson , letter to John Dickinson (23 July 1801), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 9 , pp. 280-282.
• Letter to Gouverneur Morris (Washington, 1 Nov. 1801) [4] . In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 35: 1 August to 30 November 1801 , Barbara B. Oberg, ed., Princeton , 2008, ISBN 0691137730 ISBN 9780691137735 , p. 545. [5] Editor's notes at bottom of letter: PrC (DLC); at foot of text: "Gouverneur Morris esq." 1 Word underlined . [PrC=press copy; DLC= Library of Congress. See "EDITORIAL METHOD AND APPARATUS", sec. 3, "Descriptive Symbols," xvi-xvii [6] Editor notes that "All manuscripts of the above types are assumed to be in the hand of the author of the document to which the descriptive symbol pertains."). In manuscript to G. Morris, Jefferson underlined the word own. ] [7]
• Thomas Jefferson's First State of the Union Address (8 December 1801)
• Letter to J. Dickinson (19 December 1801)
• Letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT. (1 January 1802) This statement is the origin of the often used phrase "separation of Church and State" .
• Letter to Thomas Cooper (29 November 1802)
• Letter to Benjamin Rush (12 April 1803)
• "Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others" in a letter to Benjamin Rush (12 April 1803) . Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 9 Works Vol. 9 (PDF) , pp. 462
• Letter to Edward Dowse (19 April 1803)
• Louisiana Treaty of Cession, Art. III (30 April 1803)
• On the Louisiana Purchase, Letter to John Breckinridge (12 August 1803)
• Draft of proposed Amendment to the Constitution by Jefferson, who thought an amendment would be necessary to authorize the Louisiana Purchase to be incorporated into the United States (August 1803)
• Letter to Albert Gallatin (13 December 1803) ME 10:437 : The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 10, p. 437
• Letter to John Randolph (1 December 1803), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 109 , pp. 54
• Letter to Judge John Tyler (June 28, 1804); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 11, page 33
• Letter to Abigail Adams about the Sedition Acts (1804) [8]

Second Inaugural Address (1805)

• We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations, as with individuals, our interests, soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties; and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is taken on its word, when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.
• Advising the origination of an annual fund from surplus revenue.

Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

• Thomas Jefferson's Sixth State of the Union Address (2 December 1806). Advising the origination of an annual fund to be spent through new constitutional powers (by new amendments) from projected surplus revenue.
• Thomas Jefferson's Sixth State of the Union Address (2 December 1806)
• Letter to Andrew Jackson (3 December 1806)
• Agreeably to the request of the House of Representatives, communicated in their resolution of the 16th instant, I proceed to state under the reserve therein expressed, information received touching an illegal combination of private individuals against the peace and safety of the Union, and a military expedition planned by them against the territories of a power in amity with the United States, with the measures I have pursued for suppressing the same....
• Special Message to Congress on the Burr Conspiracy, declaring his former Vice President an illegal conspirator and a fugitive from justice (22 January 1807)
• Letter to Count Diodati (29 March 1807)
• Letter to John W. Eppes (28 May 1807) [9]
• Letter to John Norvell (11 June 1807). Original and transcript
• Thomas Jefferson's Seventh State of the Union Address (27 October 1807). Description of the negotiations and rejected treaty of James Monroe and William Pinkney with Britain over maritime rights, and subsequent negotiations over the British sinking of the American ship Chesapeake , leading to an American embargo (The Embargo Act).
• Letter to General Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War (August 9, 1808) in regards to enforcing the American embargo.
• Thomas Jefferson's Eighth State of the Union Address (8 November 1808)
• Letter to Lieutenant Governor Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts (November 13, 1808) concerning a petition from the island of Nantucket for food during the American embargo.
• Letter to Thomas Leiper (11 January 1809). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 , pp. 89
• Letter to his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph (7 February 1809) on the termination of the American embargo.
• Letter to David Baillie Warden (25 February 1809)
• Letter to Henri Grégoire (25 February 1809), as quoted in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes. Federal Edition . Collected and Edited by Paul Leicester Ford. Also quoted in The Science and Politics of Racial Research by William H. Tucker (1994), p. 11

Post-Presidency (1809)

• Letter to Maria Jefferson Eppes (8 March 1809)
• Letter to the Republican Citizens of Washington County, Maryland (31 March 1809), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1871), edited by H. A. Washington, Vol. 8, p. 165
• Letter to John Wyche (19 May 1809)
• Letter to Joel Barlow (8 October 1809); Jefferson here expresses an aversion to supporting the "fixed opinion" that blacks were not equal to whites in general mental capacities, which he asserts in his Notes on the State of Virginia he had advanced as "a suspicion only".
• Letter to Dr. Maese (1809) ME 12:231 : The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 12, p. 231; also quoted at "Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government : Money & Banking" at University of Virginia
• Letter to Larkin Smith (1809)
• Account of a conversation with Col. Richard M. Johnson in 1809, as recounted in A Biographical Sketch of Col. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, p.12 (Saxton & Miles, New York, 1843)

• Letter to Abbe Salimankis (1810) ME 12:379 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 12, p. 379; also quoted at "Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government: Money & Banking" at University of Virginia
• Letter to Thomas Cooper (1810)
• Letter to William Duane (August 12, 1810)
• Letter to James Ogilvie (4 August 1811)
• Letter to Charles Willson Peale (20 August 1811)
• Statement during an early stage of the War of 1812 , in a letter to William Duane (4 August 1812)
• Referring to the importance of well trained militia amidst the populations of the states and their preferability to standing armies, in a letter to James Monroe (19 June 1813), published Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 19 June 1813 ; though most publications of the letter since the 1830s usually provide a date of 18 June 1813, the actual manuscript seems to distinctly read "June 19 '13" ; a portion of this statement is sometimes paraphrased: "Every citizen should be a soldier."
• Letter to William Canby (18 September 1813)
• Letter to John Adams (28 October 1813)
• Letter to John W. Eppes (6 November 1813). Reported in Albert Ellery Bergh, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1907), p. 430
• Letter to Thomas Law (6 November 1813) FE 9:433 : The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (10 Vols., 1892-99) edited by Paul Leicester Ford
• Letter to Alexander von Humboldt (6 December 1813)
• Scanned letter at The Library of Congress
• Transcript at The Library of Congress
• Letter to Richard Rush (1813)
• Letter to Walter Jones (2 January 1814) .
• Letter to Oliver Evans (16 January 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) Vol. 13, p. 66
• Letter to John Adams , on Christian scriptures (24 January 1814)
• To Dr. Thomas Cooper Monticello , February 10, 1814
• Letter to Horatio G. Spafford (17 March 1814)
• Letter to Thomas Law (13 June 1814)
• Letter to John Adams (5 July 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 , pp. 397–398
• Letter to John Wayles Eppes (9 September 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 , pp. 425-426
• Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 10 September 1814,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0471 . [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 7, 28 November 1813 to 30 September 1814, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 649–655.] Note: In the above letter, Jefferson was comparing England to America, regarding the former as a less prosperous and socially just nation than the United States.
• Letter to Miles King (26 September 1814)
• Comment on establishing the University of Virginia, in a letter to Thomas Cooper (7 October 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) edited by Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol VII, p. 200
• Letter to Nicolas Gouin Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller (1814) who had been prosecuted for selling the book Sur la Création du Monde, un Systême d'Organisation Primitive by M. de Becourt, which Jefferson himself had purchased.
• Letter to John Adams (10 June 1815)
• Letter to Thomas Leiper (12 June 1815). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 , pp. 477–478.
• The sentence "I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be." was used by US-President Barack Obama in his A New Beginning Speech .
• Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (13 October 1815). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 , p. 492
• Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
• Letter to Charles Thomson (9 January 1816), on his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (the " Jefferson Bible "), which omits all Biblical passages asserting Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and resurrection. Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 , pp. 498–499
• Letter to Benjamin Austin (January 8, 1816)
• Letter to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (24 April 1816)
• Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:18: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 15, p. 18
• Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23
• Letter to Francis W. Gilmer (27 June 1816); The Writings of Thomas Jefferson edited by Ford, vol. 10, p. 32
• Letter to William Plumer (21 July 1816)
• Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp (30 July 1816), denouncing the doctrine of the Trinity.
• Letter to John Adams (1 August 1816)
• Letter to Mrs. Harrison Smith (6 August 1816)
• Letter to Mathew Carey (11 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , p. 42
• Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , pp. 43
• Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , pp. 43-44
• Letter to Francis W. Gilmer (1816)
• Letter to Samuel Kercheval (1816)
• Letter to John Adams (1816)
• Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817)
• Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817) This statement has been referred to as " Jefferson's Axiom "
• Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , pp. 48–49
• Letter to John Adams, 5 May 1817, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Lipscomb-Bergh edition, 1903), Volume XV, p. 109
• Letter to Albert Gallatin (16 June 1817). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , p. 73
• Letter to papal nuncio Count Dugnani (14 February 1818)
• Thomas Jefferson to Mordecai M. Noah, May 28, 1818. Manuscript Division, Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
• Letter to John Adams (13 November 1818) regarding the death of Abigail Adams
• Letter to Nathaniel Macon ( 12 January 1819 ) [10]
• Letter to Nathaniel Macon ( 12 January 1819 ) [11]
• Letter to Ezra Stiles Ely (25 June 1819), published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1983) by Dickinson W. Adams; Attributions of this letter as one to Ezra Stiles , President of Yale College (who died in 1795) are incorrect. See also Positive Atheism's "Questionable Thomas Jefferson Quotations"
• Letter to Judge Spencer Roane (6 September 1819)
• Letter to William Short (31 October 1819), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , pp. 141–142
• Letter to William Short (31 October 1819)
• Letter to John Adams (7 November 1819) ME 15:224 : The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 15, p. 224
• Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (4 April 1819)

Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

• 24 June 1813
• 6 November 1813, ME 13:431: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 13, p. 431
• 11 September 1813, ME 13:361

Letter to Isaac McPherson (1813)

• Every man should be protected in his lawful acts, and be certain that no ex post facto law shall punish or endamage him for them. ...The sentiment that ex post facto laws are against natural right, is so strong in the United States, that few, if any, of the State constitutions have failed to proscribe them. The federal constitution indeed interdicts them in criminal cases only; but they are equally unjust in civil as in criminal cases, and the omission of a caution which would have been right, does not justify the doing what is wrong. Nor ought it to be presumed that the legislature meant to use a phrase in an unjustifiable sense, if by rules of construction it can be ever strained to what is just.
• The law books abound with similar instances of the care the judges take of the public integrity, Laws, moreover, abridging the natural right of the citizen, should be restrained by rigorous constructions within their narrowest limits.
• See also Letter to Isaac McPherson (13 August 1813) ME 13:333.
• The sentence He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. is sometimes paraphrased as "Knowledge is like a candle. Even as it lights a new candle, the strength of the original flame is not diminished."
• England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Letter to Edward Coles (1814)

• Your favour of July 31, was duly received, and was read with peculiar pleasure. The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor to both the head and heart of the writer. Mine on the subject of slavery of negroes have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain , and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reprobation.
• I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast, & had become as it were the vital spirit of every American, that the generous temperament of youth, analogous to the motion of their blood, and above the suggestions of avarice, would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it.
• Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come .
• This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man

Letter to Joseph Milligan (6 April 1816)

• ...the more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.
• To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

• The mother principle [is] that 'governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.'" .
• But inequality of representation in both Houses of our legislature, is not the only republican heresy in this first essay of our revolutionary patriots at forming a constitution. For let it be agreed that a government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns (not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city, or small township, but) by representatives chosen by himself, and responsible to him at short periods , and let us bring to the test of this canon every branch of our constitution.
• In England, where judges were named and removable at the will of an hereditary executive, from which branch most misrule was feared, and has flowed, it was a great point gained, by fixing them for life, to make them independent of that executive. But in a government founded on the public will, this principle operates in an opposite direction, and against that will. There, too, they were still removable on a concurrence of the executive and legislative branches. But we have made them independent of the nation itself. They are irremovable, but by their own body, for any depravities of conduct, and even by their own body for the imbecilities of dotage. The justices of the inferior courts are self- chosen, are for life, and perpetuate their own body in succession forever, so that a faction once possessing themselves of the bench of a county, can never be broken up, but hold their county in chains, forever indissoluble. Yet these justices are the real executive as well as judiciary, in all our minor and most ordinary concerns. They tax us at will; fill the office of sheriff, the most important of all the executive officers of the county; name nearly all our military leaders, which leaders, once named, are removable but by themselves. The juries, our judges of all fact, and of law when they choose it, are not selected by the people, nor amenable to them. They are chosen by an officer named by the court and executive. Chosen, did I say? Picked up by the sheriff from the loungings of the court yard, after everything respectable has retired from it. Where then is our republicanism to be found? Not in our constitution certainly, but merely in the spirit of our people. That would oblige even a despot to govern us republicanly. Owing to this spirit, and to nothing in the form of our constitution, all things have gone well. But this fact, so triumphantly misquoted by the enemies of reformation, is not the fruit of our constitution, but has prevailed in spite of it. Our functionaries have done well, because generally honest men. If any were not so, they feared to show it.
• Only lay down true principles, and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.
• The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen, in his person and property, and in their management. Try by this, as a tally, every provision of our constitution, and see if it hangs directly on the will of the people. Reduce your legislature to a convenient number for full, but orderly discussion. Let every man who fights or pays, exercise his just and equal right in their election .
• I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia , which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt . Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
• Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading ; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead.
• I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
• The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction; and this declaration can only be made by their majority. That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves.

Letter to Albert Gallatin (16 June 1817)

• Whereas, our tenet ever was, and, indeed, it is almost the only landmark which now divides the federalists from the republicans, that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated; ...

• Letter to José Correia da Serra (11 April 1820)
• Letter to William Short (13 April 1820)
• On the Missouri Compromise , in a letter to John Holmes (22 April 1820), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: 1816-1826 (1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 10, p. 157; also quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address at the New York Civil War Centennial Commission’s Emancipation Proclamation Observance, New York City (12 September 1962)
• On slavery, in a letter to John Holmes (22 April 1820)
• Letter to John Holmes (22 April 1820)
• Letter to William Short (4 August 1820) on his reason for composing a Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus and referring to Jesus’ biographers, the Gospel writers . Published in Thomas Jefferson: Writings , Merrill D. Peterson, ed., New York: Library of America, 1994, pp. 1435–1440
• Compare John 4:24 , 1 John 1:5 , D&C 131
• Thomas Jefferson to Jacob De La Motta, September 1, 1820. Manuscript Division, Papers of Thomas Jefferson. For the background of the letter see "Thomas Jefferson's Letter on Religious Freedom" Dr. Kenneth Libo Ph.D and Michael Skakun from the Center for Jewish History, New York City, New York.
• Letter to William Charles Jarvis (28 September 1820)
• Letter to Thomas Ritchie (25 December 1820)
• Letter to William Roscoe (27 December 1820)
• Letter to William Charles Jarvis (1820)
• Letter, Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, 1821: ME 15-341, as quoted in The Assault on Reason , Al Gore, A&C Black (2012, reprint), p. 87 : ISBN 1408835800 , 9781408835807, and Federal Jurisdiction, Form #05.018 , Sovereignty Education and Defense Ministry (2012)
• On the U.S. Congress, in his Autobiography (6 January 1821)
• Letter to Spencer Roane (9 March 1821)
• Letter to John Adams (12 September 1821)
• Referring to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, in his Autobiography (1821)
• Autobiography (1821), reprinted in Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson , ed. Philip S. Foner, New York: Wiley Book Company (1944} p. 464
• Autobiography (1821) in notes describing some of the debates of 1779 on slavery, quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1843), p. 49
• The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.
• Thomas Jefferson , letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (26 June 1822), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , pp. 241–243. Note that Unitarianism rejects concepts such as Hell, the Trinity, Original Sin, the infallability of the Bible, as well as claims that any one religion has a monopoly on theological truth and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, it accepts the notion that reason, rational thought, science, and philosophy can coexist with faith in God.
• Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (19 July 1822), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , p. 244
• Letter to Thomas Cooper (3 November 1822), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , p. 272
• Letter to James Smith (1822)
• Letter to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress)
• Letter to Justice William Johnson (1823)
• Letter to Justice William Johnson (12 June 1823)
• Letter to Hugh P. Taylor (4 October 1823)
• Letter to Marquis de la Fayette (November 4, 1823); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 15, page 491
• Letter to John Davis (18 January 1824). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes , Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford , ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 , pp. 331–332
• Letter to Henry Lee (10 August 1824)
• Letter to William Ludlow (6 September 1824)
• Letter to General Alexander Smyth , on the book of Revelation (or The Apocalypse of St. John the Divine) (17 January 1825) [13]
• "A Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life"
• Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.
• Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
• Never spend your money before you have it.
• Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
• Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
• We never repent of having eaten too little.
• Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
• How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
• Take things always by their smooth handle.
• When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.
• Letter to the infant Thomas Jefferson Smith (21 February 1825) ( Image at Library of Congress )
• Letter to William Short (1825)
• Letter to William B. Giles (26 December 1825)
• "Thoughts on Lotteries" (1826)
• Letter to James Madison (February 17, 1826), quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XVI (1905; 1907), p. 156
• Letter to Henry Lee (15 May 1826)
• Letter to Roger C. Weightman, on the decision for Independence made in 1776, often quoted as if in reference solely to the document the Declaration of Independence (24 June 1826)
• Letter to Roger C. Weightman , declining to attend July 4th ceremonies in Washington D.C. celebrating the 50th anniversary of Independence, because of his health. This was Jefferson's last letter . (24 June 1826)
• " A death-bed Adieu from Th. J. to M. R. " Jefferson's poem to his eldest child, Martha "Patsy" Randolph , written during his last illness in 1826. [14] Two days before his death, Jefferson told Martha that in a certain drawer in an old pocket book she would find something intended for her. [15] The "two seraphs" refer to Jefferson's deceased wife and younger daughter. His wife, Martha (nicknamed "Patty"), died in 1782; his daughter Mary (nicknamed "Polly" and also "Maria," died in 1804
• Last words (Jefferson died on 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence)
• A few accounts declare that he asked on the night of the third: "Is it the fourth?" Most accounts declare the cited words were his last, and that he died a few hours before John Adams , whose last words are reported to have been: "Thomas — Jefferson — still surv — " or "Thomas Jefferson still survives." .

Letter to A. Coray (1823)

• The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual , are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government . Modern times have the signal advantage, too, of having discovered the only device by which these rights can be secured, to wit: government by the people, acting not in person, but by representatives chosen by themselves, that is to say; by every man of ripe years and sane mind, who either contributes by his purse or person to the support of his country.
• The small and imperfect mixture of representative government in England, impeded as it is by other branches, aristocratical and hereditary, shows yet the power of the representative principle towards improving the condition of man. With us, all the branches of the government are elective by the people themselves, except the judiciary, of whose science and qualifications they are not competent judges. Yet, even in that department, we call in a jury of the people to decide all controverted matters of fact, because to that investigation they are entirely competent, leaving thus as little as possible, merely the law of the case, to the decision of the judges. And true it is that the people, especially when moderately instructed, are the only safe, because the only honest, depositories of the public rights, and should therefore be introduced into the administration of them in every function to which they are sufficient; they will err sometimes and accidentally, but never designedly, and with a systematic and persevering purpose of overthrowing the free principles of the government. Hereditary bodies, on the contrary, always existing, always on the watch for their own aggrandizement, profit of every opportunity of advancing the privileges of their order, and encroaching on the rights of the people.
• The extent of our country was so great, and its former division into distinct States so established, that we thought it better to confederate as to foreign affairs only. Every State retained its self-government in domestic matters, as better qualified to direct them to the good and satisfaction of their citizens, than a general government so distant from its remoter citizens, and so little familiar with the local peculiarities of the different parts. [...] There are now twenty-four of these distinct States, none smaller perhaps than your Morea, several larger than all Greece. Each of these has a constitution framed by itself and for itself, but militating in nothing with the powers of the General Government in its appropriate department of war and foreign affairs. These constitutions being in print and in every hand, I shall only make brief observations on them, and on those provisions particularly which have not fulfilled expectations, or which, being varied in different States, leave a choice to be made of that which is best. You will find much good in all of them, and no one which would be approved in all its parts. Such indeed are the different circumstances, prejudices, and habits of different nations, that the constitution of no one would be reconcilable to any other in every point. A judicious selection of the parts of each suitable to any other, is all which prudence should attempt [...].
• For if experience has ever taught a truth, it is that a plurality in the supreme Executive will forever split into discordant factions, distract the nation, annihilate its energies, and force the nation to rally under a single head, generally an usurper. We have, I think, fallen on the happiest of all modes of constituting the Executive, that of easing and aiding our President, by permitting him to choose Secretaries of State, of Finance, of War, and of the Navy, with whom he may advise, either separately or all together, and remedy their divisions by adopting or controlling their opinions at his discretion; this saves the nation from the evils of a divided will, and secures to it a steady march in the systematic course which the President may have adopted for that of his administration.
• Our different States have differently modified their several judiciaries as to the tenure of office. Some appoint their judges for a given term of time; some continue them during good behavior, and that to be determined on by the concurring vote of two-thirds of each legislative House. In England they are removable by a majority only of each House. The last is a practicable remedy; the second is not. The combination of the friends and associates of the accused, the action of personal and party passions, and the sympathies of the human heart, will forever find means of influencing one-third of either the one or the other House, will thus secure their impunity, and establish them in fact for life. The first remedy is the best, that of appointing for a term of years only, with a capacity of reappointment if their conduct has been approved.
• At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.
• But, whatever be the constitution, great care must be taken to provide a mode of amendment, when experience or change of circumstances shall have manifested that any part of it is unadapted to the good of the nation. In some of our States it requires a new authority from the whole people, acting by their representatives, chosen for this express purpose, and assembled in convention. This is found ' too difficult for remedying the imperfections which experience develops from time to time in an organization of the first impression. A greater facility of amendment is certainly requisite to maintain it in a course of action accommodated to the times and changes through which we are ever passing. In England the constitution may be altered by a single act of the legislature, which amounts to the having no constitution at all. In some of our States, an act passed by two different legislatures, chosen by the people, at different and successive elections, is sufficient to make a change in the constitution. As this mode may be rendered more or less easy, by requiring the approbation of fewer or more successive legislatures, according to the degree of difficulty thought sufficient, and yet safe, it is evidently the best principle which can be adopted for constitutional amendments.
• I have stated that the constitutions of our several States vary more or less in some particulars. But there are certain principles in which all agree, and which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of the life, liberty, property, and safety of the citizen :
• Freedom of religion , restricted only from acts of trespass on that of others.
• Freedom of person , securing every one from imprisonment, or other bodily restraint, but by the laws of the land. This is effected by the well-known law of habeas corpus .
• Trial by jury , the best of all safeguards for the person, the property, and the fame of every individual.
• The exclusive right of legislation and taxation in the representatives of the people .
• Freedom of the press , subject only to liability for personal injuries. This formidable censor of the public functionaries, by arraigning them at the tribunal of public opinion, produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by revolution. It is also the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral, and social being.

Letter to Frances Wright (1825)

• The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object .

Posthumous publications

• Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1829) edited by Thomas Jefferson Randolph, p. 70
• The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853-1854), edited by H. A. Washington, Vol. 7, pp. 210, 257
• As quoted in The Life and Writings of Thomas Jefferson : Including All of His Important Utterances on Public Questions (1900) by Samuel E. Forman, p. 429
• As quoted in The Man from Monticello : An Intimate Life of Thomas Jefferson (1969) by Thomas J. Fleming, p. 250
• Epitaph, upon his instructions to erect a "a plain die or cube ... surmounted by an Obelisk" with "the following inscription, and not a word more...because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered." It omits that he had been President of the United States, a position of political power and prestige, and celebrates his involvement in the creation of the means of inspiration and instruction by which many human lives have been liberated from oppression and ignorance.

On financial matters

• Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bill for Establishing a National Bank., 1791. ME 3:146
• Letter to Jean Baptiste de Ternant, 1791. ME 8:247
• Letter to John Taylor (26 November 1798), shortened in The Money Masters to "I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution ... taking from the federal government their power of borrowing".
• Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1802. ME 10:323
• Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1803. ME 10:439
• Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1803. ME 10:437
• Letter to Dr. Maese, 1809. ME 12:231
• Letter to Abbe Salimankis, 1810. ME 12:379
• Letter to Thomas Law, 1813. FE 9:433
• Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:61
• Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:189
• Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:190
• Letter to José Correia da Serra (1814) ME 14:224
• Letter to William H. Crawford, 1815. ME 14:242
• Letter to George Logan, 1816
• Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1815. ME 14:356
• Letter to James Monroe, 1815. ME 14:228
• Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816): The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 15, p. 18)
• Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (May 10, 1817) ME 15:112; reported in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904), vol. 15, p. 112
• Letter to John Adams (1819) ME 15:224
• Letter to William C. Rives (1819) ME 15:232
• Letter to Charles Pinckney (1820) ME 15:280
• Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1825) ME 19:281
• Thomas Jefferson, in letter to Madame de Tessé (25 Apr 1788). In Thomas Jefferson Correspondence: Printed from the Originals (1916), 7.
• Thomas Jefferson Letter (23 Dec 1790) to Martha Jefferson Randolph. Collected in B.L. Rayner (ed.), Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson (1832), 192.
• Thomas Jefferson, Letter (24 Mar 1824) to Mr. Woodward. Collected in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence (1854), 339.
• Thomas Jefferson, In Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies from the Papers of T. Jefferson (1829), Vol. 1, 144
• Attributed to Jefferson by Daniel Webster in a letter of 15 June 1852 addressed to Professor Pease, recalling a Sunday spent with Jefferson more than a quarter of a century before.
• Attributed by an unnamed "distinguished officer of the United States Government" in the Sixth Report of the American Temperance Society , May, 1833, pp. 10-11 .
• Later variant: Were I to commence my administration again,... the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, "Does he use ardent spirits?"
• On his profits from slavery as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• Jefferson's Farm Book as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• As quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• Letter to colonel Randolph as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• In a letter to James Dinsmore as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• In letter to plantation manager, as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• As quoted in The Americans by Daniel Boorstin. See Truth from the "Zog Bog" by Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn, 1993, 224 p.
• Quoted in Remsburg, John E. (1906). Six Historic Americans . New York: The Truth Seeker Company. p. 74. OCLC 2219498 .   , who claimed it to be from a letter to "Dr. Woods." The full letter is never reproduced, and the Jefferson Foundation lists the quotation as spurious.

Misattributed

• As quoted in Careertracking: 26 success Shortcuts to the Top (1988) by James Calano and Jeff Salzman; though used in an address by Bill Clinton (31 March 1997), and sometimes cited to Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) no earlier occurence of this has yet been located.
• "It is not clear where the phrase originated from, but there is no proof that Jefferson ever uttered these words." Huff, Elizabeth In matters of style, swim with the current...(Spurious Quotation) . at Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Thomas Jefferson Foundation. June 8, 2011
• Variant: Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.
• First attributed to Jefferson in 1945, this does not appear in any known Jefferson document. When governments fear the people, there is liberty... , Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. It first appears in 1914, in Barnhill, John Basil (1914). "Indictment of Socialism No. 3" (PDF). Barnhill-Tichenor Debate on Socialism . Saint Louis, Missouri: National Rip-Saw Publishing. pp. p. 34 . Retrieved on 2008-10-16 .  
• Often attributed to Jefferson, no original source for this has been found in his writings, and the earliest established source for similar remarks are those of John Philpot Curran in a speech upon the Right of Election (1790), published in Speeches on the late very interesting State trials (1808):
• In a biography of Major General James Jackson published in 1809, author Thomas Charlton wrote that one of the obligations of biographers of famous people is
• Variant: " Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty ; power is ever stealing from the many to the few" (from a speech by Wendell Phillips at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on January 28, 1852; quoted by John Morley, ed., The Fortnightly , Volume VIII, Chapman and Hall, 1870, p. 67).
• This has actually become a common paraphrase of a statement that is believed to have originated with Benjamin Franklin : Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .
• This seems more like something Benjamin Franklin might have said. There's no record Thomas Jefferson said it.
• Variation : Disobedience to tyranny is obedience to God.
• This statement has often been attributed to Jefferson and sometimes to English theologian William Tyndale , or Susan B. Anthony , who used it, but cited it as an "old revolutionary maxim" — it was widely used as an abolitionist and feminist slogan in the 19th century. Benjamin Franklin proposed in August 1776 a very similar quote (Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God) as the motto on the Great Seal of the United States . The earliest definite citations of a source yet found in research for Wikiquote indicates that the primary formulation was declared by Massachusetts Governor Simon Bradstreet after the overthrow of Dominion of New England Governor Edmund Andros in relation to the " Glorious Revolution " of 1688, as quoted in Official Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the State Convention: assembled May 4th, 1853 (1853) by the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, p. 502. It is also quoted as a maxim that arose after the overthrow of Andros in A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1883) by Samuel Adams Drake. p. 426
• Dissent is the highest form of patriotism , Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia
• While some people think that dissent is unpatriotic, I would argue that dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
• Law professor Jim Lindgren of The Volokh Conspiracy has traced the possible origin of this saying back as far as the 11 November 1984 obituary of pacifist activist Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson in the Philadelphia Inquirer , quoting a 1965 interview. The direct quote there is: "Dissent from public policy can be the highest form of patriotism," she said in an interview in 1965. "I don't think democracy can survive without it, even though you may be crucified by it at times." According to the professor's research , the misattribution was popularized in the 1990's by ACLU president Nadine Strossen . Bill Mullins of the American Dialect Society did further research .
• Commonly quoted on many websites, this quotation is actually from an address by President Gerald Ford to the US Congress (12 August 1974)
• Motto of United States Magazine and Democratic Review . First used in introductory essay by editor John L. O'Sullivan in the premier issue (October, 1837, p. 6 ). Attributed to Jefferson by Henry David Thoreau , this statement is cited in his essay on civil disobedience, but the quote has not been found in Jefferson's own writings. It is also commonly attributed to Thomas Paine , perhaps because of its similarity in theme to many of his well-documented expressions such as "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one."
• Variant: "That government is best which governs least"; reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 56
• See the Positive Atheism site on the extreme unlikelihood of this quote being authentic. It actually contains some known phrases of Jefferson's, but they are compounded with almost certainly false statements into a highly misrepresentative whole. Jefferson's own opinions on Jesus , God , Christianity and general opinions about them were far more complex than is indicated in this statement.
• According to the Jefferson Library, this is among the many statements misattributed to Jefferson.
• According to the Jefferson Library, this is misattributed to Jefferson .
• Respectfully Quoted says this is "obviously spurious", noting that the OED's earliest citation for the word "deflation" is from 1920. The earliest known appearance of this quote is from 1935 (Testimony of Charles C. Mayer, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Seventy-fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 5357 , p. 799)
• The earliest known appearance of this statement is from 1895 (Joshua Douglass, "Bimetallism and Currency", American Magazine of Civics , 7:256). It is apparently a combination of paraphrases or approximate quotations from three separate letters of Jefferson (longer excerpts in sourced section):
• Letter to John Taylor (1816)
• Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (1817)
• Letter to John W. Eppes (1813)
• Has been attributed to Stephen Leacock 's "Literary Lapses" (1910), but the quote does not appear in the Project Gutenberg edition of this work.
• Variant: I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
• There are no indications that Jefferson ever stated anything like this; slight variants of this statement seem to have become widely attributed to Jefferson only since its appearance in three books of 2004: The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey (2004) by Ken Schoolland, p. 235; Damn-ocracy — Government From Hell!: The Political, Economic And Money System (2004) by Wendall Dennis and Reason And Reality : A Novel (2004) by Mishrilal Jain, p. 232; see also info at Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia .
• This quotation first appeared in Dreams Come Due: Government and Economics as if Freedom Mattered (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 312, written under the pseudonym of John Galt. It is there attributed to Jefferson, but is not found anywhere in his works. See the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia .
• Variant: When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
• Variant: When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.
• Not attributed to Jefferson until the 21st century. May be a loose paraphrasing of a passage from Declaration of Independence (1776): "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
• Not attribution to Jefferson earlier than William Jennings Bryan's Baltimore address of January 20, 1900
• California Digital Newspaper Collection, Los Angeles Herald .; appears in proximity to a reference to Jefferson in the 1878 "Notes of a Voyage to California Via Cape Horn", reprinting a 1850 Sacramento advertisment
• via Google Books Samuel Curtis Upham, "Notes of a Voyage to California Via Cape Horn: Together with Scenes in El Dorado, in the Year 1849-'50, with an Appendix Containing Reminiscences: Together with the Articles of Association and Roll of Members of "The Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days of California" .. Earliest known variant is from the August 31, 1844 issue of "Niles' National Register", authored by the committee of William C. Bryant, George P. Barker, John W. Edmonds, David Dudley Field, Theodore Sedgwick, Thomas W. Tucker, and Isaac Townsend.
• via Google Books .
• This is a misquotation of a prayer from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer ( ministry should be industry and arrogance should be arrogancy ). This was a revision from an earlier edition. The original form, written by George Lyman Locke, appeared in the 1885 edition. In 1994 William J. Federer attributed it to Jefferson in America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations , pp. 327-8. See the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia .
• Not found in any of Thomas Jefferson's writings. This may be a conflation of Jefferson's "chains of the Constitution" comment with Ayn Rand 's statement in her essay, Man's Rights : "There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two — by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first." [16]
• Not found in Jefferson's writings. [17]
• Not found in Jefferson's writings, according to the Jefferson Monticello center . First known appearance in print is from 2004.
• This misattribution seems to have originated as improper quoting of an actually site-created preamble to an online page of Jefferson's quotes or paraphrases at the site Family Guardian — self described as a "Nonprofit Christian religious ministry dedicated to protecting people and families from extortion, persecution, exploitation, socialism, divorce, crime, and sin." Among the preambles to their pages, these remarks summarizing the site creators' assessments on "Immigration Policy" for their page of Jefferson's statements regarding the subject , have occasionally been wrongly copied and distributed in various internet articles and comments as if they were direct "quotes" of Jefferson, sometimes with spurious citations to specific documents, most commonly the source of the first actual quote citation on that page: an 1806 letter to Albert Gallatin. It should also be noted that even the provided "quotes" at this site are not absolutely reliable, as on their index page for quotes of Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government they indicate that some of the "quotes" they use are modernized and "generalized" (or in other words: paraphrased ) in ways which diverge slightly from literal quotations of the original sources cited.
• Attributed to Jefferson in speeches by FDR [18] and JFK, [19] but actually a quote about Jefferson by Charles A. Beard in 1936. [20]
• A wonderful quote, if only it were true, despite no shortage image-quote-memes online.
• "Spurious" here: https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tyranny-defined-which-legal-government-spurious-quotation
• "Not True" here: https://www.truthorfiction.com/thomas-jefferson-tyranny-is-defined-as-that-which-is-legal-for-the-government-quote/
• This particular quote was attributed to Jefferson on the Internet starting from 2008 and first appearing in print from 2013 but while he may have grown hemp , he never actually smoked it. According to the Jefferson Library this is not a quote from Jefferson.

Quotes about Jefferson

• Lord Acton , private notes, quoted in G. E. Fasnacht, Acton's Political Philosophy: An Analysis (1952), p. 197
• Henry Adams , History of the United States of America During the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson (1891), p. 277
• John Adams , in a letter to Jefferson (July 1813), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1903) Vol. 13, edited by Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, p. 301
• Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)
• Stephen E. Ambrose , To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian , pp. 2–5
• 1986 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)
• Joyce Appleby , 'Introduction: Jefferson and His Complex Legacy', in Peter S. Onuf (ed.), Jeffersonian Legacies (1993), pp. 11-12
• Joyce Appleby , 'Introduction: Jefferson and His Complex Legacy', in Peter S. Onuf (ed.), Jeffersonian Legacies (1993), pp. 13-14
• Cristina Beltrán Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (2020) p 39
• Andrew Burstein , as quoted in "The Unknown Jefferson: An Interview with Andrew Burstein" by Richard Shenkman, at History News Network (25 July 2005)
• Jimmy Carter in the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation documentary, Thomas Jefferson: Pursuit of Liberty (1991), quoted in 'How Presidents See the Presidency', Humanities , Volume 14, Number 1 (January/February 1993), p. 12
• Noam Chomsky , ' Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (2002) edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel
• Paul K. Conkin, 'The Religious Pilgrimage of Thomas Jefferson', in Peter S. Onuf (ed.), Jeffersonian Legacies (1993), p. 20
• Paul K. Conkin, 'The Religious Pilgrimage of Thomas Jefferson', in Peter S. Onuf (ed.), Jeffersonian Legacies (1993), p. 21
• Virginia abolitionist Moncure Conway on Jefferson's reputation as the would be emancipator as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• Noble Cunningham, as quoted in Where Did the Party Go? , by Jeff Taylor, p. 29
• George William Curtis , "The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question" (18 October 1859), New York City
• George William Curtis , as quoted in Manual Of Patriotism : For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York (1900), by Charles Rufus SkinnerTake, p. 261
• Historian David Brion Davis , as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• William A. DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents (1984), p. 37-38
• Frederick Douglass , What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (1852)
• Frederick Douglass , "Self-Made Men" (1872)
• The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois : A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (1968)
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz , An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)
• Elijah Fletcher , Ed. Thos. Jefferson Loony; et al. (2006). "Elijah Flecther's Account of a Visit to Monticello" May 8, 1811. Thos. Jefferson Papers, Retirement Series, Vol. 3: Princeton. p. 610
• William F. Friedman to the editors of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (November 17, 1949), quoted in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 1: 1760–1776 , eds. Julian P. Boyd, Lyman H. Butterfield and Mina R. Bryan (1950), p. viii, n. 3
• William Lloyd Garrison , ‘Jefferson on Slavery’, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, A Monthly Periodical Work, Containing Original Essays, Documents, and Facts, Relative to the Subject of African Slavery: Volume II. Third Series—Commencing May, 1831 (1831–1832), pp. 202–203
• Henry George , 'Jefferson and the Land Question' (May 1, 1904), quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Vol. XVI (1907), p. iv
• Emma Goldman "What I Believe" (1908)
• Daniel Green, To Colonize Eden: Land and Jeffersonian Democracy (1977), pp. 31-32
• Nikole Hannah-Jones , The 1619 Project (2019)
• Carl Hart Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021)
• Christopher Hitchens , "Living in Thomas Jefferson's Fictions", NPR , 1 June 2005, accessed 7 May 2012
• M. Andrew Holowchak, in "Is Monticello Monetizing Race at Jefferson's Expense?", History News Network (15 December 2018)
• An unnamed European visitor, in dialogue with Jefferson, as quoted in A Winter in Washington : or, Memoirs of the Seymour Family (1824) by Margaret Bayard Smith , Vol. 2, p. 37; a few years later Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson (1832) by B. L. Rayner presents a slightly different rendition of this dialogue, and identifies the visitor as Baron Alexander von Humboldt , who visited Washington in June 1804:
• Andrew Jackson to Joseph Guild (April 24, 1835), quoted in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson: Volume 5 (1931), p. 339
• Alexandra Méav Jerome, The Jefferson Qur'an
• John F. Kennedy , in an address at a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners (29 April 1962), quoted in The White House Diary, at the JFK Library
• Fiske Kimball , Thomas Jefferson, Architect, Original Designs in the Collection of Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Junior (1916), p. 89
• Elizabeth Kolbert Interview with Democracy Now (2014)
• Meridel Le Sueur "Crusaders" (1955)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. , New York Civil War Centennial Commission’s Emancipation Proclamation Observance (12 September 1962)
• Michael Lienesch, 'Thomas Jefferson and the American Democratic Experience: The Origins of the Partisan Press, Popular Political Parties, and Public Opinion', in Peter S. Onuf (ed.), Jeffersonian Legacies (1993), p. 316
• Abraham Lincoln , Letter to H.L. Pierce and others (Springfield, Illinois, April 6, 1859) , published in Essential American History: Abraham Lincoln - The Complete Papers and Writings, Biographically Annotated, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln © 2012, Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck, 86450 Münster, Germany, ISBN: 97838496200103
• Abraham Lincoln , Letter to H.L. Pierce and others (Springfield, Illinois, April 6, 1859) , published in Essential American History: Abraham Lincoln - The Complete Papers and Writings, Biographically Annotated, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln , 2012, Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck, 86450 Münster, Germany, ISBN: 97838496200103
• Forrest McDonald , The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1976), pp. 168-169
• James Madison to J. K. Paulding (April 1, 1831), quoted in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Fourth President of the United States: Vol. IV, 1829–1836 (1865), p. 175
• Malcolm X , ' Afro-American History ' (January 24, 1964), International Socialist Review , Vol. 28 No. 2, (March-April 1967), pp. 3-48
• Dumas Malone as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• John Chester Miller , The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (1977; 1994), p. 142
• Albert Jay Nock , in "Free Speech and Plain Language" in The Atlantic Monthly (January 1936)
• Conor Cruise O'Brien , The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (1996; 1998), p. 318
• James Parton , Life of Thomas Jefferson: Third President of the United States (1874), p. iii
• "The History of a Secret". Jefferson's Blood . PBS Frontline. May 2000.
• Henry S. Randall Jefferson and Music (1858)
• Jeff Randolph (his grandson) as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson , by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine , (October 2012)
• "Letter from Henry Randall to James Parton, June 1, 1868". Jefferson's Blood. PBS Frontline. 2000. Retrieved September 18, 2011
• Ishamel Reed , ' Gliberals ', The New York Times (March 31, 1973), p. 35
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt , Looking Forward [1933] (2009), pp. xii, 5
• Theodore Roosevelt to F. S. Oliver (August 8, 1906), quoted in Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters: Volume II (1920), p. 23
• Lynn Seldon, 52 Virginia Weekends: Great Getaways and Adventures for Every Season , (2000), 2nd edition, p. 33
• Francis Butler Simkins, Spotswood Hunnicutt, Sidman P. Poole, Virginia: History, Government, Geography (1957), p. 314
• Clint Smith (writer) , How the Word is Passed (2021)
• Alexander H. Stephens , The Cornerstone Speech (1861), Savannah, Georgia
• Benjamin Tillman , as quoted in Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), by Francis Butler Simkins. Louisiana State University Press. OCLC 1877696, p. 144
• David Walker on Jefferson's Query XIV in Notes on the State of Virginia (September 28, 1829), quoted in Peter P. Hinks, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (2010), pp. 29–30
• George Will , ' Person of the Millennium ', The Washington Post (December 16, 1990)
• John Sharp Williams , speech in the House of Representatives (January 26, 1904), quoted in Congressional Record: The Proceedings and Debates of the Fifty-Eighth Congress, Second Session. Volume XXXVIII, Part II (1904), col. 1226
• Woodrow Wilson , speech in New York (April 16, 1906), quoted in Jeffrey Legh Sedgwick, ‘Jeffersonianism in the Progressive Era’, in Gary L. McDowell and Sharon L. Noble (eds.), Reason and Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson's Legacy of Liberty (1997), p. 202

Primary sources

• Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (1984, ISBN 0-940450-16-X Library of America edition; see discussion of sources at [21] . There are numerous one-volume collections; this is perhaps the best place to start.
• Thomas Jefferson, Political Writings ed by Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball. Cambridge University Press. 1999
• Lipscomb, Andrew A. and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. The Writings Of Thomas Jefferson 19 vol. (1907) not as complete nor as accurate as Boyd edition, but covers TJ from 1801 to his death. It is out of copyright, and so is online free.
• Boyd, Julian P. et al, eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. The definitive multivolume edition; available at major academic libraries. 31 volumes covers TJ to 1800, with 1801 due out in 2006. See description at [22]
• The Jefferson Cyclopedia (1900) large collection of TJ quotations arranged by 9000 topics; searchable; copyright has expired and it is online free.
• The Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606-1827, 27,000 original manuscript documents at the Library of Congress. online collection
• online edition
• Adams, Dickinson W., ed. Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels (1983). All three of Jefferson's versions of the Gospels, with relevant correspondence about his religious opinions. Valuable introduction by Eugene Sheridan.
• Bear, Jr., James A., ed. Jefferson's Memorandum Books , 2 vols. (1997). Jefferson's account books with records of daily expenses.
• Cappon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959)
• Smith, James Morton, ed. The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826 , 3 vols. (1995)
• Founding Fathers of the United States
• List of presidents of the United States

External links

• Brief biography at The White House
• "The Thomas Jefferson Papers" at the Library of Congress
• Jefferson Digital Archive at The University of Virginia
• The Works of Thomas Jefferson (12 Vols. 1905), Edited by Paul Leicester Ford
• Monticello - Jefferson's Home (with extensive Quicktime panoramic images)
• Thomas Jefferson A film by Ken Burns at PBS
• The Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.
• Jefferson biography
• "The Declaration of Independence" at Wikisource
• Drafting the "Declaration of Independence" at the Library of Congress
• Initial drafts of The Declaration of Independence (with photographs)
• Jefferson's last letter
• Quotes on War and Peace by T.Jefferson
• Quotes of Jefferson at Positive Atheism
• University of Virginia - Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government
• The Letters of Thomas Jefferson

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Iii. first inaugural address, 4 march 1801, iii. first inaugural address.

Friends & Fellow Citizens,

Called upon to undertake the duties of the first Executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to look towards me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge, and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire. A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye; when I contemplate these transcendent objects, and see the honour, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation & humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking. Utterly indeed should I despair, did not the presence of many, whom I here see, remind me, that, in the other high authorities provided by our constitution, I shall find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal, on which to rely under all difficulties. To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation, and to those associated with you, I look with encouragement for that guidance and support which may enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked, amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.

During the contest of opinion through which we have past, the animation of discusions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely, and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the constitution all will of course arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.   All too will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind, let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance, as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonising spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others; and should divide opinions as to measures of safety; but every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it. I know indeed that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear, that this government, the world’s best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one, where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.—Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels, in the form of kings, to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Let us then, with courage and confidence, pursue our own federal and republican principles; our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high minded to endure the degradations of the others, possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation, entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them, enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed and practised in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here, and his greater happiness hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government; and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

About to enter, fellow citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend every thing dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our government, and consequently those which ought to shape its administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations.—Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political:—peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none:—the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies:—the preservation of the General government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home, and safety abroad: a jealous care of the right of election by the people, a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided:—absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of the despotism:—a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace, and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them:—the supremacy of the civil over the military authority:—economy in the public expence, that labor may be lightly burthened:—the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith:—encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid:—the diffusion of information, and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason:—freedom of religion; freedom of the press; and freedom of person, under the protection of the Habeas Corpus:—and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation, which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages, and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment:—they should be the creed of our political faith; the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps, and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.

I repair then, fellow citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation, and the favor, which bring him into it. Without pretensions to that high confidence you reposed in our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose pre-eminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country’s love, and destined for him the fairest page in the volume of faithful history, I ask so much confidence only as may give firmness and effect to the legal administration of your affairs. I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional; and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts. The approbation implied by your suffrage, is a great consolation to me for the past; and my future solicitude will be, to retain the good opinion of those who have bestowed it in advance, to conciliate that of others by doing them all the good in my power, and to be instrumental to the happiness and freedom of all.

Relying then on the patronage of your good will, I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choices it is in your power to make. And may that infinite power, which rules the destinies of the universe, lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.

Printed in the National Intelligencer , 4 Mch. 1801; at head of text: “President’s Speech this day At 12 o’clock, Thomas Jefferson , President of the United States, Took the oath of office required by the Constitution, in the Senate Chamber, in the presence of the Senate, the members of the House of Representatives, the public officers, and a large concourse of citizens. Previously to which he delivered the following Address:” (this version in DLC : TJ Papers, 110:18838).

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Intellectual Freedom Quotes

“Congress Shall Make No Law Respecting an Establishment of Religion, or Prohibiting the Free Exercise Thereof; or Abridging the Freedom of Speech, or of the Press; or the Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble, and To Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances.”— First Amendment

“First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.”—Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Ashcroft V. Free Speech Coalition (00-795) 198 F.3d 1083, affirmed.

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”— Harry Truman

“If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”—George Orwell, author, c. 1945

"Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. When the light of publicity may reach any student, any teacher, inquiry will be discouraged. The books and pamphlets that are critical of the administration, that preach an unpopular policy in domestic or foreign affairs, that are in disrepute in the orthodox school of thought will be suspect and subject to investigation. The press and its readers will pay a heavy price in harassment. But that will be minor in comparison with the menace of [345 U.S. 41, 58] the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line. If the lady from Toledo can be required to disclose what she read yesterday and what she will read tomorrow, fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes of the land. Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the press."—U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, UNITED STATES v. RUMELY , 345 U.S. 41 (1953)

“For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that—either now or in the uncertain future—patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.”— The Eternal Value of Privacy by Bruce Schneier

“[Confiscating a book and punishing its author] is a sign that one does not have a good case, or at least doesn't trust it enough to defend it with reasons and refute the objections. Some people even go so far as to consider prohibited or confiscated books to be the best ones of all, for the prohibition indicates that their authors wrote what they really thought rather than what they were supposed to think . . .”—Johann Lorenz Schmidt, 1741

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941), Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357 (1927) .

Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.—George Orwell, 1984

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."—Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. U.S. (1928)

“Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”— Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

“I don't want to be shut out from the truth. If they ban books, they might as well lock us away from the world.”—Rory Edwards, 12, Washington Post, Getting It Down at Writing Camp

“A popular government, without popular information, or the mean of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”—James Madison

“Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941), Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357 (1927)

“Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”—Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education

“Before the week is out, be a patriot: Encourage a child to fall in love with a book. Apply for a library card. And accept the ALA's invitation to Let Freedom Read.”—Linda Campbell, Star-Telegram Staff Writer, “Here's a novel thought: Don't restrict books”

“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”—Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, “The One Un-American Act”

“Protecting the safety of the American people is a solemn duty of the Congress; we must work tirelessly to prevent more tragedies like the devastating attacks of September 11th. We must prevent more children from losing their mothers, more wives from losing their husbands, and more firefighters from losing their heroic colleagues. But the Congress will fulfill its duty only when it protects both the American people and the freedoms at the foundation of American society. So let us preserve our heritage of basic rights. Let us practice as well as preach that liberty. And let us fight to maintain that freedom that we call America.”—U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on the Anti-Terrorism Bill, 10/25/2001

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”—Noam Chomsky, speaking in a BBC television interview with John Pilger on The Late Show (1992)

When books are challenged, restricted, removed, or banned, an atmosphere of suppression exists. The author may make revisions, less for artistic reasons than to avoid controversy. The editor and publisher may alter text or elect not to publish for economic and marketing reasons. Staff in bookstores and libraries may find published works too controversial and, fearing reprisals, will choose not to purchase those materials. The fear of the consequences of censorship is as damaging as, or perhaps more damaging than, the actual censorship attempt. After all, when a published work is banned, it can usually be found elsewhere. Unexpressed ideas, unpublished works, unpurchased books are lost forever.—2000 Banned Books Week Resource Guide

“If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of a despotic power...[T]he hours of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, all are tempted to betray your imprudent or unguarded follie; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides — where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard...Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foreign aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that [...] we are absurd enough to call ourselves ‘free and enlightened’ while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just.”—Edward Livingston, opposing the Alien & Sedition bills of 1798, in Congress

“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime . . . .”—Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, dissenting Ginzberg v. United States, 383 U.S. 463 (1966)

“Most librarians view these assaults on their First Amendment traditions with deep concern. Anything of consequence in the care of libraries offends someone somewhere, of course. The challenge for public libraries is to find ways to remind political, educational and moral leaders that to remove or restrict access to controversial material is to invite the ultimate suppression of all material.”—Paul McMasters, Libraries & First Amendment Overview

“Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”— ALA Library Bill of Rights

“The Constitution exists precisely so that opinions and judgments, including esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature, can be formed, tested, and expressed. What the Constitution says is that these judgments are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even with the mandate or approval of a majority. Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.”—Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

“Every legislative limitation upon utterance, however valid, may in a particular case serve as an inroad upon the freedom of speech which the Constitution protects.”—Supreme Court Justice Stanley F. Reed

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.”—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941), Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357 (1927)

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”—Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

“We should build respect and understanding between the diverse cultures of the world. We should help construct communities where people of different backgrounds can live together as neighbors. Freedom is something for which we must fight, not by limiting it but by strengthening it.”—Alex Byrne, Chair of the IFLA/FAIFE Committee

“We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.”— ALA Code of Ethics

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”—Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989)

“Liberty of speech inviteth and proveketh liberty to be used again,and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge.”—Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605

“We must teach students about their First Amendment rights rather than restrict their use of particular books and materials. As educators, we must encourage students to express their own opinions while respecting the views of others.”—Protect Our Freedom of Speech, Teach It?, Pat Scales

“The Library is an open sanctuary. It is devoted to individual intellectual inquiry and contemplation. Its function is to provide free access to ideas and information. It is a haven of privacy, a source of both cultural and intellectual sustenance for the individual reader.

Since it is thus committed to free and open inquiry on a personal basis, the Library must remain open, with access to it always guaranteed.”— Robert Vosper

“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”—Salman Rushdie

“It will be asked whether one would care to have one’s young daughter read these books. I suppose that by the time she is old enough to wish to read them she will have learned the biologic facts of life and the words that go with them. There is something seriously wrong at home if those facts have not been met and faced and sorted by then; it is not children so much as parents that should receive our concern about this. I should prefer that my own three daughters meet the facts of life and the literature of the world in my library than behind a neighbor’s barn, for I can face the adversary there directly. If the young ladies are appalled by what they read, they can close the book at the bottom of page one; if they read further, they will learn what is in the world and in its people, and no parents who have been discerning with their children need fear the outcome. Nor can they hold it back, for life is a series of little battles and minor issues, and the burden of choice is on us all, every day, young and old.”—Judge Curtis Bok, Commonwealth v. Gordon, 66 Pa. D. & C. 101, 110.

“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.”—Dame Rebecca West

“Damn all expurgated books; the dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.”—Walt Whitman

“Only the suppressed word is dangerous.”—Ludwig Börne

“What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. ~ The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ~ To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted.’ ~ Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. ~ Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”—A German professor describing the coming of fascism in They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer

“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

“[I]t’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”— Judy Blume

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but ... do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless warriors be used, as good almost kill a Man a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”— Areopagitica , John Milton, 1644

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”— Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire, 1906

“The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label “controversial” views, to distribute lists of “objectionable” books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as citizens devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.”— Freedom to Read Statement

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”— UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this [i.e., the purchase of an apparent geological or astronomical work] can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. If [this] book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God’s sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.”— Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:127

“It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas. ‘This freedom [of speech and press] . . . necessarily protects the right to receive . . . .’ Martin v. City of Struthers , 319 U.S. 141, 143 (1943); see Griswold v. Connecticut , 381 U.S. 479, 482 (1965); Lamont v. Postmaster General , 381 U.S. 301, 307 -308 (1965) (BRENNAN, J., concurring); cf. Pierce v. Society of Sisters , 268 U.S. 510 (1925). This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, see Winters v. New York , 333 U.S. 507, 510 (1948), is fundamental to our free society. ”—Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Stanley v. Georgia , 394 U.S. 557 (1969)

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”—Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”— Areopagitica , John Milton, 1644

“[L]ibraries in the United States can contribute to a future that values and protects freedom of speech in a world that celebrates both our similarities and our differences, respects individuals and their beliefs, and holds all persons truly equal and free.”— Libraries: An American Value

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”—Dissertations on First Principles of Government, Thomas Paine

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”— On Liberty , John Stuart Mill

“[F]reedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.”—Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

“Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old’s right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.”—Seventh District Judge Richard Posner, American Amusement Machine Association, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Teri Kendrick, et al., Defendants-Appellees (2001)

“Every man—in the development of his own personality—has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature.”—Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment, Thomas Emerson

“Indeed, perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”—Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr., American Civil Liberties Union, et al. v. Janet Reno (No. 98-5591)

See also Quotes about Libraries and Democracy , compiled by Nancy Kranich (2001)

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