• “Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?” ~Thomas Jefferson (1801)
  
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• “It is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our government… Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever persuasion, religious or political.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1801)
  

• “Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1775)
  

• “I think all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1785)
  

• “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1820)
  

• “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors?” ~Thomas Jefferson (1781)
  

• “We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1816)
  

• “We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1782)
  

• “There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1785)
  

• “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1800)