Thomas Jefferson

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

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

I have a right to nothing, unless I have a right to be in a state of perfect freedom, exempt from the control of any other human power.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.

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

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government.

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

Knowledge is power.

The people are the only censors of their governors.

The cornerstone of democracy is the free press.

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 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.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

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.

When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then, and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the conditions of man will proceed in improvement.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.

It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction.

The most important of all human endeavors is the striving for freedom and justice.