We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.
Tag: Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), U.S. Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd U.S. President.
Government gaining ground
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
Virtue is not hereditary
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Fiscal prudence
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 monies.
Surrendering our freedoms
Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them.
Deficit spending
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Dependence
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
More dangerous than standing armies
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
The sin of subsidies
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
The tree of liberty
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. 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. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.