Thomas Jefferson"[A] rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive."
"[A] wise and frugal government...shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
"[T]he States can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore...never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market."
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
"A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."
"A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government."
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated. ... A wise and frugal government ... shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."
"Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day."
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."
"Excessive taxation ... will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election."
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."
"It is not honorable to take mere legal advantage, when it happens to be contrary to justice."
"Never suppose that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing..."
"One single object... [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation."
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."
"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave."
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
"The duty of an upright administration is to pursue its course steadily, to know nothing of these family [dissensions], and to cherish the good principles of both parties."
"The foundation on which all [constitutions] are built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every preeminence but that annexed to legal office, and particularly the denial of a preeminence by birth."
"The freedom and happiness of man...[are] the sole objects of all legitimate government."
"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."
"The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain."
"The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife."
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
"The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys."
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive."
"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread."
"When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another."