Thomas Jefferson Quotes

The fight against corruption is not bound to high-profile arrests and high-profile investigations. The fight against corruption is successful if you prevent corruption taking place in the first place.

An obvious precaution against the corruption of power is to divide the government.

It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.

Counter-corruption agencies cannot make a difference unless they are independent of the government actors they are supposed to monitor, restrain, and punish.

The speech at issue are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature that they present a clear and present danger that they would bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

We could have prevented the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon if we had 20,000 troops shoulder to shoulder.

There would be no difficulty in securing the rights of the people and the liberties of Texas if men would march to their duty and not fly like recreants from danger. Texas must be defended and liberty maintained.

If the church says we will not accept you here or that we will expose you if you are stealing the resources of the country or stealing the resources of a private company or other establishment, where you work, then we would not have the type of problem that we have in this country. If only the church does so - just the church.

Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny.

It is not our frowning battlements...or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land... Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.

That's the key - to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn't matter what we say or think we have. It's not enough to believe in something; it matters what we actually defend.

Freedom can never be taken for granted. Each generation must safeguard it and extend it. Your parents and elders sacrificed much so that you should have freedom without suffering what they did. Use this precious right to ensure that the darkness of the past never returns.

Peace is precious to us. It is the way of life we strive for with all the strength and wisdom we possess. But more precious than peace are freedom and justice. We will fight, if fight we must, to keep our freedom and to prevent justice from being destroyed.

You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.

When you have a cavity in your tooth and you let it get worse, eventually you have to get a root canal. If you have something that isn't right, the earlier you treat it the easier the treatment is going to be. That's kind of common sense.

All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should.

Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.

It is the rule of law alone which hinders the rulers from turning themselves into the worst gangsters.

It is idle to talk of civil liberties to adults who were systematically taught in adolescence that they had none; and it is sheer hypocrisy to call such people freedom loving.

I'm an activist; I have to be angry all the time. That's what we do!

You are further to declare that we hold sacred the rights of conscience, and may promise to the whole people, solemnly in our name, the free and undisturbed exercise of their religion. And...that all civil rights and the right to hold office were to be extended to persons of any Christian denomination.

Democracy necessarily means a conflict of will and ideas, involving sometimes a war of the knife between different ideas.

I'm half Asian, so people immediately go, "Oh, you do kung fu," like that's what we do. We wake up, we do kung fu, we brush our teeth. It's just assumed that you're not working your ass off to make this believable and make this something great, and we absolutely are.

Because federal hate crime laws criminalize thoughts, they are incompatible with a free society.

I actually start drawing things. Usually they're abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.