“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=807&chapter=88152&layout=html&Itemid=27 (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
1810s

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Thomas Jefferson 456

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

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“Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=807&chapter=88152&layout=html&Itemid=27 (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
1810s
Context: If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” said Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 4 (p. 34)

“Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Variant: If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

“It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to http://www.familytales.org/dbDisplay.php?id=ltr_thj1489 George Washington (4 January 1786)
1780s
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Liberty is never safe.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Said to the Countess Russell and recorded in her diary, Lady John Russell: A Memoir (1910), edited by Desmond McCarthy and Agatha Russell. p. 252
1870s

“That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free State; that sstanding armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Article 13
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

“No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

Gideon Tucker

Final accounting in the Estate of A.B. (1866) http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/no_mans_life_liberty_or_property_are_safe_while_the_legislature_is_in_sessi/

“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Speech in Detroit, Michigan (7 October 1952)

“When you read you can have every adventure. In the pages of a book you can be anyone you ever dreamed of being… They can never tell you you're too young to slay the dragon -- because it all happens right here, where it's safe.”

Janette Oke (1935) Canadian writer

Source: Love Comes Softly

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

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Thomas Jefferson 456

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