Thomas Jefferson — "We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed…"

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

"A people who are free, and who mean to remain so, must be armed."

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

"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the civil institutions of the people, have become a very formidable engine against the civil rights and liberties of man."

"It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."