Quotes by Thomas Jefferson

What has been the effect of coericion [sic]?  To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.  To support roguery and errors all over the earth...  [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments.  To make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.

It will be asked how will the two masses of Continental and of State money have cost the people of the United States seventy-two millions of dollars, when they are to be redeemed now with about six million? I answer that the difference, being sixty-six millions, has been lost on the paper bills separately by the successive holders of them. Every one, through whose hands a bill passed, lost on that bill what it lost in value during the time it was in his hands. This was a real tax on him; and in this way the people of the United States actually contributed those sixty-six millions of dollars during the war, and by a mode of taxation the most oppressive of all because the most unequal of all.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day

Honesty is the first chapter in the Book of Wisdom

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fi fty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves.

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God