That ideas should spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral
and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to
have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made
them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their
density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have
our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of
society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all
religions agree (for all forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, or bear
false witness), and that we should not intermeddle with the particular
dogmas in which all religions differ, and which are totally unconnected
with morality.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one
another; shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of
industry and improvement.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose
both, and deserve neither.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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If we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a
wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform
their discretion by education.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and
mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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A little rebellion now and then...is a medicine necessary for the sound
health of government.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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The most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of
knowledge among the people.  No other sure foundation can be devised, for
the preservation of freedom and happiness.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
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I never submitted the whole system of my opinion 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.
	-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, (1789)
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Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of
their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our
natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.
	-- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to F. W. Gilmer, 1816