The Safe Depository of Ultimate Powers

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

– Thomas Jefferson,
letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820

*Painting of Thomas Jefferson by John Trumbull, 1788 (source)