Thomas Jefferson People Quotations

The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.

If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.

If Americans ever allow banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The issuing powers should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.

The good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment b

A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences

Governments are republican only in proportion as they employ the will of the people and execute it

I like to see the people awake and alert.

All authority belongs to the people.

[The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.

People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.

The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. And certainly they would never consent to be so used were they not deceived. To avoid this they should be instructed to a certain degree.

I sincerely wish you may find it convenient to come here. the pleasure of the trip will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. it will make you adore your own country, it's soil, it's climate, it's equality, liberty, laws, people & manners. my god! how little do my countrymen know...

Every people may establish what form of government they please, and change it as they please, the will of the nation being the only thing essential.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

A noiseless course, not meddling with the affairs of others, unattractive of notice, is a mark that society is going on in happiness. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.

I hold it certain that to open the doors of truth and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.

The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.

[The people] are in truth the only legitimate proprietors of the soil and government.

The Constitution on which our Union rests, shall be administered by me [as President] according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption - a meaning to be found in the explanations of those who advocated, not those who opposed it, and who opposed it merely lest the construction should be applied which they denounced as possible.

Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.

All power is inherent in the people.

Democrats consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them, therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.

No government can continue good, but under the control of the people.

The people, especially when moderately instructed, are the only safe, because the only honest, depositaries of the public rights, and should therefore be introduced into the administration of them in every function to which they are sufficient; they will err sometimes and accidentally, but never designedly, and with a systematic and persevering purpose of overthrowing the free principles of the government.

No other depositories of power [but the people themselves] have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge.

Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils of misgovernment.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Should [reformers] attempt more than the established habits of the people are ripe for, they may lose all and retard indefinitely the ultimate object of their aim.

Defend our liberties and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindred and tongues.

Choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom.

The people will not understand the importance of the Second Amendment until it is too late.

A private central bank issuing the public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army. We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!

The Bible makes the best people in the world.

All authority belongs to the people... In questions of power let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief with chains of the Constitution.

The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance

I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared... We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude... The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public money. We are endeavoring to reduce the government to the practice of rigid economy to avoid burdening the people.

While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be ... The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.

Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government...

Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.

Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights.

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.

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them.

[Oppose] with manly firmness [any] invasions on the rights of the people.

No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.

Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people.

The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.

The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.

The rights of the people to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen, people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union.

On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already?

If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.

We might have been a free and great people together.

I pledge undying hostility to any government restrictions on the free minds of the people.

The purse of the people is the real seat of sensibility. Let it be drawn upon largely, and they will then listen to truths which could not excite them through any other organ.

Industry, commerce and security are the surest roads to the happiness and prosperity of people.

The sickly, weakly, timid man fears the people, and is a Tory by nature. The healthy, strong and bold cherishes them, and is formed a Whig by nature.

It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.

The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.

Let the farmer forevermore be honored in his calling; for they who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights.

...is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent reliance? ...the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless.

Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people; they fix too for the people the principles of their political creed.

I like the power given the Legislature to levy taxes, and for that reason solely approve of the greater house being chosen by the people directly.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people.

The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom.

Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand.

I know nothing more important to inculcate into the minds of young people than the wisdom, the honor, and the blessed comfort of living within their income.

There is not a single crowned head in Europe whose talents or merit would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of any parish in America.

It is Mortifying to suppose it possible that a people able and zealous to contend with the Enemy should be reduced to fold their Arms for want of the means of defence; yet no resources that we know of, ensure us against this event.

Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one.

Above all I hope that the education of the common people will be attended to so they won't forget the basic principles of freedom.

How did Jefferson feel about the people of his day who were the equivalent of our modern day penecostals? You know, those revelation reveling tongue speaking idiots...