A “no” uttered from the deepest conviction is better and greater than a “yes” merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Force, violence, pressure or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding out the true path for ourselves and fearlessly following it.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
The policy of the American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.
— Thomas Jefferson
The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.
— Milton Friedman, Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of The Road to Serfdom
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything
— Friedrich Hayek
In war, the stronger overcomes the weaker. In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker.
— Frederic Bastiat
The “private sector” of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and…the “public sector” is, in fact, the coercive sector.
— Henry Hazlitt
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
— Milton Friedman
The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.
— Ludwig von Mises
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.
— Adam Smith
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
— Richard Feynman
What is called “orthodox” economics is in most countries barred from the universities and is virtually unknown to the leading statesmen, politicians, and writers. The blame for the unsatisfactory state of economic affairs can certainly not be placed upon a science which both rulers and masses despise and ignore.
— Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.
— Thomas Jefferson
What is wrong with our age is precisely the widespread ignorance of the role which these policies of economic freedom played in the technological evolution of the last two hundred years. People fell prey to the fallacy that the improvement of the methods of production was contemporaneous with the policy of laissez faire only by accident.
— Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Don’t knock the rich. When did a poor person ever give you a job?
— Dr. Laurence J. Peter
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
— Douglas Casey
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
— Mark Twain
Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.
— John Adams
We cannot expect existing businesses to promote legislation that would harm them. It is up to the rest of us to promote the public interest by fostering competition across the board and to recognize that being pro-free enterprise may sometimes require that we be anti-existing business.
— Milton Friedman
Never appeal to a man’s ‘better nature.’ He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
When a government takes over a people’s economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs.
— Maxwell Anderson
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
— Milton Friedman
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
— Frederic Bastiat
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
— William Boetcker
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect.
— Sam Ewing
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
— Ronald Reagan
When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
— Benjamin Franklin
Government is not the generator of economic growth; working people are.
— U.S. Senator Phil Gramm
I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread.
— Thomas Jefferson
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits
— Plutarch
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
— Ayn Rand
One definition of an economist is somebody who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it will work in theory.
— Ronald Reagan
The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with Democrats and Republicans alike, most all of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
— Senator Warren Rudman
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
— Adam Smith
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
— Sir Alexander Fraser Tyler
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
— Ludwig von Mises
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
— Frederic Bastiat
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
— Thomas Jefferson
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.
— P.J. O’Rourke
What is called ‘capitalism’ might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and the capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.
— Thomas Sowell
The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.
— Friedrich Hayek
There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder.
— Ronald Reagan
Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
— Winston Churchill
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget, awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A panhandler is far more moral than corporate welfare queens….The panhandler doesn’t enlist anyone to force you to give him money. He’s coming up to you and saying, “Will you help me out?” The farmers, when they want subsidies, they’re not asking for a voluntary transaction. They go to a congressman and say, “Could you take his money and give it to us?” That’s immoral.
— Walter E. Williams
The principle that both sides benefit from trade is readily visible when it involves two parties within a country; it somehow becomes confused when an invisible political barrier separates the parties. Neither the mercantilists of yesteryear nor those who fuss about the trade deficit today have ever satisfactorily answered this fundamental question: Since each and every trade is “favorable” to the individual traders, how is it possible that these transactions can be totaled up to produce something “unfavorable”?
— Lawrence W. Reed, The Trade Deficit: Much Ado About Nothing
Economic ignorance is the breeding ground of totalitarianism
— John Jewkes, British Economist
A glance at the economic system and methods of totalitarian states — of the Soviet bloc, for example — is enough to show that state-ownership of the means of production does not lead to an increase of wealth for the people but, on the contrary, to their exploitation, whereas the reverse is true of the free countries and peoples, which are denounced for their so-called capitalism but which clearly illustrates how private ownership of the means of production is contributing more and more to the general welfare.
— Ludwig Erhard
I champion an economic order ruled by free prices and markets…the only economic order compatible with human freedom.
— Wilhelm Ropke
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
— Thomas Sowell
National saving is the only way a country can have its capital and own it too. Models of the economic growth process identify national saving as one of the key policy variables in influencing a nation’s living standards in the long run.
— Edward Gramlich
We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success — only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development
— Ronald Reagan
The dilemma … is between the democratic process of the market in which every individual has his share and the exclusive rule of a dictatorial body. Whatever people do in the market economy is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner’s own plan for the plans of his fellowmen. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.
— Ludwig von Mises
Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.
— William Howard Taft
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
— Walter Lippman
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.
— William James, The Variety of Religious Experience, 1902
Agriculture, manufacturers, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.
— Thomas Jefferson, First annual message to Congress; December 8, 1801
The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with Democrats and Republicans alike, most all of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
— Warren R. Rudman
A free economy will not break down. All depressions are caused by government interference. and, the cure is always offered, so far, to take more of the poisons that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy.
— Ayn Rand
True capitalism is based upon one simple principle: that all exchanges of property are made with the voluntary consent of all parties. Private ownership of property and competition — the other two components of capitalism in most traditional definitions — are actually results of this foundational principle. As all governments are institutions of coercion, there is no way for them to acquire property through voluntary exchange. Further, with all exchanges being voluntary, sellers must by definition compete with one another in order to sell their products. So, the foundation of “capitalism” is really the non-aggression principle applied to property. Capitalism requires that no one’s property can be taken from them without their consent.
— Tom Mullen
The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.
— Thomas Jefferson
Those who don’t read the newspapers are better off than those who do insofar as those who know nothing are better off than those whose heads are filled with half-truths and lies.
— Thomas Jefferson
Decalogue
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
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, a hundred.
— Thomas Jefferson
I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus, building a wall of separation between Church and State.
— Thomas Jefferson, Quoted in Andrew A. Lipscomb’s Writings 16:281
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as they are injurious to others.
— Thomas Jefferson
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. …the idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.
— Thomas Jefferson
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
— Thomas Jefferson
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.
— Thomas Jefferson
The policy of the American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.
— Thomas Jefferson
We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles . The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.
— Thomas Jefferson
For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security.
— Thomas Jefferson
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.
— Thomas Jefferson
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives 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.
— Thomas Jefferson
One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.
— Thomas Jefferson
If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.
— Thomas Jefferson
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.
— Thomas Jefferson
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. Enlighten the people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
— Thomas Jefferson
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.
— Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
— Thomas Jefferson
The general (federal) government will tend to monarchy, which will fortify itself from day to day, instead of working its own cures.
— Thomas Jefferson
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.
— Thomas Jefferson
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.
— Thomas Jefferson
…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 Enngland, 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 existance under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep….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 its 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 periculosum libertatum quam quietum servitutum. 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. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, with have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
— Thomas Jefferson
…I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. 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, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right:…Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves….
— Thomas Jefferson, A letter to Colonel Edward Carrington about the perpetrators of Shays’s Rebellion.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be… if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.
— Thomas Jefferson
To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, ‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.’
— Thomas Jefferson
I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.
— Thomas Jefferson
I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread.
— Thomas Jefferson
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
— Thomas Jefferson
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.
— Thomas Jefferson
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? 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, Letter to William Stephens Smith, quoted in Padover’s Jefferson On Democracy
The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys.
— Thomas Jefferson
Our tenet ever was . . . that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action.
— Thomas Jefferson
On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p322.
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.
— Thomas Jefferson
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
— Thomas Jefferson
Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.
— Thomas Jefferson
The law of self-preservation is higher than written law.
— Thomas Jefferson
The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone.
— Thomas Jefferson
On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
— Thomas Jefferson
One single object…[will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation.
— Thomas Jefferson
The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.
— Thomas Jefferson
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.
— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801
Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.
— Thomas Jefferson
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 to rest on inference.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison December 20, 1787
An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1785
Agriculture, manufacturers, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.
— Thomas Jefferson, First annual message to Congress; December 8, 1801
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed.
— Thomas Jefferson
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.
— Thomas Jefferson
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.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1801
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
— Thomas Jefferson
I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
— Thomas Jefferson
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address; 1801
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1779
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
— Thomas Jefferson
To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom.
— Thomas Jefferson, June 18, 1799
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, 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 had earned.
— Thomas Jefferson, government,socialism
The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, law, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body.
— Thomas Jefferson, government
I have so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government, that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Comte Diodati, 1789.
Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Miller, 1808
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
— Thomas Jefferson
