No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. |
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society. |
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least. |
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. |
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. |
The constitutions of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property and freedom of the press. |
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. |
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. |
An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State. |
In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes. |
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them. |
That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. |
The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. |
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. |
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe. |
No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. |
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. |
I... [proposed] three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes.
1. Elementary schools for all children generally, rich and poor.
2. Colleges for a middle degree of instruction, calculated for the
common purposes of life and such as should be desirable for all who were
in easy circumstances.
And 3d. an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences generally and in
their highest degree...
The expenses of [the elementary] schools should be borne by the
inhabitants of the county, every one in proportion to his general
tax-rate. This would throw on wealth the education of the poor. |
Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away. |
The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors. |
