Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.
Interpretation
Laws protect us from the harm caused by others, but they cannot prevent us from harming ourselves.
This quote by Thomas Jefferson highlights the limitations of law as a protective mechanism. While laws are designed to safeguard individuals from wrongdoing by others, they cannot legislate personal responsibility or prevent individuals from making choices that lead to their own harm. It suggests that self-regulation and personal accountability are equally important in leading a safe and fulfilling life.
In practice
In a debate about personal freedom, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of self-responsibility.
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 think if something's emotionally real - and I'm not even talking about in movies or in art, but in life - you can't really argue with that, even if your intellectual mind might know differently.
The chief problem about death ... is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought.
You do what you want and know is right. That is the only law.
As the sun shines both on the cedar and the smallest flower, so the Divine sun illumines each soul.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.
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