Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs.
Interpretation
Government should not interfere in individual's religious beliefs.
This quote by Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the importance of separating church and state, suggesting that civil authorities should not involve themselves in the personal religious practices and beliefs of individuals. It reflects a fundamental principle of religious freedom and the idea that personal faith is a private matter that should not be governed or influenced by the state.
In practice
In a debate about the role of government in education, one might quote Jefferson to argue for religious neutrality.
The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared
βWe must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.
A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
I was the Jane Roe of Roe vs. Wade, but Jane Roe has been laid to rest.
I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder
One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy.
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