In no particular order...but there are some doozies in here.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.
Never spend your money before you have it.
Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. (fore-telling of the actual takeover in 1916 by the not-so-federal-reserve???)
If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men 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.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.
Delay is preferable to error.
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
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.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
Why, none other than ....
-- Thomas Jefferson
Later this week when we cover Abraham Lincoln, the context of the quotes regarding the American Government evolves by about 100 years.
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