Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and later served as the third president of the United States, was a strong believer in a democracy’s need for a free press.

Here are some quotes, from famguardian.org, attributed to Jefferson regarding the Fourth Estate:

“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.”

“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.”

“Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

“I am… for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.”

“The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information.”

It seems as if what Jefferson feared most has come to pass with the elevation of a self-serving, arrogant, incompetent, egotistical, narcissistic, pathological liar to the White House … paired with a compliant Congress.

As has been said, “The press is only an enemy to those who fear the truth.”

Photos | theimaginativeconservative.org, theatlantic.com