Trade liberty for safety or money and you'll end up with neither. Liberty, like a grain of salt, easily dissolves. The power of questioning - not simply believing - has no friends. Yet liberty depends on it.

I'd rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes, which you say you have heard insisted on by some, I assure you was never mine.

The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!

If our legislature does not heartily push our University [of Virginia] we must send our children for education to Kentucky [Transylvania College] or Cambridge [Harvard College]. The latter will return them to us as fanatics and tories, the former will keep them to add to their population.