When government fears the people, there is liberty…

Thomas Jefferson Foundation

Quotation: “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

Variations:

1. “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
2. “Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!”
3. “When the people fear the government, that’s tyranny; when the government fears the people, that’s freedom.”

Sources consulted: Searching on the phrase “fear the people,” “government fear us,” “fear the government,” “tyranny has found victory,” and “government is our servant”

1. Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition
2. Thomas Jefferson: Papers and Thomas Jefferson: Biographies collections in Hathi Trust Digital Library
3. Thomas Jefferson Retirement Papers

Earliest known appearance in print: 191412

Earliest known appearance in print, attributed to Thomas Jefferson:19943

Other attributions: Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine

Status: We have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote, “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny,” nor any evidence that he wrote its listed variations.

Comments: One source attributes this quotation to Jefferson in The Federalist.4 The Federalist, however, was the work of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, not Thomas Jefferson; nor does The Federalist contain the text of this quotation. This quotation is vaguely similar to Jefferson’s comment in an 1825 letter to William Short: “Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, &c. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.”5 To date, however, the most likely source of this quotation appears to be a series of debates on socialism published in 1914, in which John Basil Barnhill said, “Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.”

• 1.John Basil Barnhill, Barnhill-Tichenor Debate on Socialism, As It Appeared in the National Rip-Saw (Saint Louis, Mo.: The National Rip-Saw Pub. Co., 1914), 34.
• 2.To establish the earliest appearance of this phrase in print, the following sources were searched for the phrase, “When governments fear the people, there is liberty”: Google Books, Google Scholar, Amazon.com, Internet Archive, JSTOR, American Broadsides and Ephemera, American History and Culture Online: Sabin Americana, 1500-1926, Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800), Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of the Modern World: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature, America’s Historical Newspapers, 19th Century United States Newspapers, American Founding Era Collection.
• 3.Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn, Butterflies, Mind Control — The Razor’s Edge: It’s All in the Game(Las Vegas: Phoenix Source Distributors, 1994), 214.
• 4.Archimedes C. Articulo, The Experience of Philosophy (Manila, Philippines: Rex Book Store, 2008), 315.
• 5.Jefferson to William Short, January 8, 1825, in Ford, XII:335. Transcription available at Founders Online.

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