“Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish 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
“Was the government to prescribe us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now."
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that 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 disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and 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.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“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.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”
―
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
“That one generation of men in civil society have no right to make acts to bind another, is a truth that cannot be confused.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
