“The bank mania is one of the most threatening of these imitations. It is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance, and although forced at length to yield a little on this first essay of their strength, their principles are unyielded and unyielding. These have taken deep root in the hearts of that class from which our legislators are drawn, and the sop to Cerberus from fable has become history. Their principles lay hold of the good, their pelf of the bad, and thus those whom the Constitution had placed as guards to its portals, are sophisticated or suborned from their duties.”

Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (May 10, 1817) ME 15:112; reported in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904), vol. 15, p. 112
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

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3rd President of the United States of America 1743–1826

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“I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.”

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The earliest known appearance of this statement is from 1895 (Joshua Douglass, "Bimetallism and Currency", American Magazine of Civics, 7:256). It is apparently a combination of paraphrases or approximate quotations from three separate letters of Jefferson (longer excerpts in sourced section):
I sincerely believe, with you, that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies...
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The bank mania...is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance...
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Bank paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs.
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“I hope we shall… crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country”

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to George Logan, 1816 http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/049/0600/0642.jpgLetter
Posthumous publications, On financial matters
Source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Volume 10: 1 May 1816 to 18 January 1817

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