• “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 (Quoting Cesare Beccaria)
  
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• “War is not the best engine for us to resort to; nature has given us one in our commerce, which if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1797)
  

• “I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast … would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1814)
  

• “…the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.” ~Thomas Jefferson
  

• “[T]he flames kindled on the Fourth of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.” ~Thomas Jefferson, 1821
  

• “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1781)
  

• “Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1801)
  

• “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1791)
  

• “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
  ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to William C. Jarvis, 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)