SimplyNeo Quotes

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

The majority, oppressing an inidual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

1816

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

letter to Connecticut Baptists

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, 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. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

[A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.