Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

The individual is greater than the state.

We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.

Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.

All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

Economic freedom is an end in itself …. Economic freedom is an indispensable means towards the achievement of political freedom.

The nation is formed through the law of nature alone. Government stems from the will of nation. The nation stands before all things and is the source of all things. Its will is always law. Above it and before it is but the law of nature alone. By virtue of its very existence, the nation is all things that it may be. The nation cannot surrender its right to a tyrant.

The end of all political associations is, the preservation of the rights of man, which rights are liberty, property, and security; that the nation is the source of all sovereignty derived from it...

Liberty Dearer Than Union

Liberty is not collective. It is personal.

My freedom is more important than your good idea.

A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

Civil liberty is the power of a civil society or state to govern itself by its own discretion or by laws of its own making, without being subject to the impositions of any power in appointing and directing which the collective body of the people have no concern and over which they have no control

Liberty is an individual, not a collective, right.

I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away

Liberty and Independence forever.

The early American knew that freedom was nothing more than the absence of external restraint on behavior; the government could not give you freedom, it could only take it away.

Liberty, then, is the SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.

Freedom which in no other land will thrive, Freedom an English subject's sole prerogative.

Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

That Americans are entitled to freedom is incontestable on every rational principle. All men have one common original: they participate in one common nature, and consequently have one common right. No reason can be assigned why one man should exercise any power or preeminence over his fellow-creatures more than another; unless they have voluntarily vested him with it.

Self government is our right, a thing born to us at birth a thing no more to be doled out to us by another people then the right to life itself then the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind.