Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
Longer Version:
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.
For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.
Men fight for freedom; then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowlege among the people. no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.
To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.
Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it.
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.
Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason.
Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.
All we can do is to make the best of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way what is bad.
Longer Version:
All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.
A good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies. Persuasion, perseverance and patience are the best advocates on questions depending on the will of others.
I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.
The concentrating of powers in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
He, who steadily observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ.
What i value more than all things, good humor.
A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good-humor, will go far toward securing to you the estimation of the world.
Above all things, and at all times, practice yourself in good humor.
Malice will always find bad motives for good actions. -- Shall we therefore never do good?
The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy ... Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.
None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army.
The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.
When habit has strengthened our sense of duties, they leave us no time for other things; but when young we neglect them and this gives us time for anything.
If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi... in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy them all.
It is for the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as possible.
Hindsight is an exact science. Hold fast to your dreams, for it dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.
Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reeactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free.
The order of nature is that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.
Man is a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.
It is a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow their end.
In a government bottomed on the will of all, the... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.
To unequal privileges among members of the same society the spirit of our nation is, with one accord, adverse.
Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.
I believe in good luck, and the harder I work and the more I believe in myself, the luckier I get.
An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.
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.
We must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.
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 prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.
Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.
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?
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator 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.
If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong.
We might have been a free and great people together.
The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.
Where thought is free in its range, we need never fear to hazard what is good in itself.
I shall rejoin myself to my native country, with new attachments, and with exaggerated esteem for its advantages; for though there is less wealth there, there is more freedom, more ease, and less misery.
No instance exists of a person's writing two language perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.
As new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.
Any woodsman can tell you that in a broken and sundered nest, one can hardly find more than a precious few whole eggs. So it is with the family.
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. In order to flourish, the tree of Liberty needs the blood of patriots and tyrants.
No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity.
Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried.
The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.
I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.
If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can always be pretended.
What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.
Men as well as rivers grow crooked by following the path of least resistance.
For Heaven's sake discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum.
My passion strengthens daily to quit political turmoil, and retire into the bosom of my family, the only scene of sincere and purehappiness.
There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.
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.
Experience having long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish.
The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.
Lethargy is the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
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.
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.
Music furnishes a delightful recreation for the hours of respite from the cares of the day, and lasts us through life.
We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.
I have ever deemed it more honorable and more profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.
I am a sect by myself, as far as I know.
No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced in the elementary schools inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination.
If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.
Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church ... made of Christendom a slaughter-house.
All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.
The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.
The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government.
The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being.
Difficulties indeed sometimes arise; but common sense and honest intentions will generally steer through them.
Our minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country.
Dependence begets subservience and paves the way for tyranny.
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.
Nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they should get out of the way and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
If thinking men would have the courage to think for themselves, and to speak what they think, it would be found they do not differ in religious opinions as much as is supposed.