Thomas Jefferson Quotes

If we continue to allow the federal government to live beyond its means, we will all soon have to live beneath ours.

The people of Maine were tired of being in debt and tired of being overtaxed.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

The interest on our debt is going to collapse this country.

Let us not be so naive as to think that revolution is just a matter of social or economic discontent.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.

It is bad governments, not bad people, who cause revolutions.

The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.

When one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time… and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

More than ever before, Americans are suffering from back problems: back taxes, back rent, back auto payments.

The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.'

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

The Occupy Wall Street project feels like a burning ember that might light the torch of justice and inflame our longing for freedom.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

It's the old Washington fiscal game of Jenga. You try to build as much debt as you can take, as much tax as you can take, until you topple the entire economy.

When Americans are faced with the prospect that they can never earn their way to wealth, they have two choices: to rebel against the system, or to settle into depressed complacency.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country.

A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.