Claim:
U.S. President Thomas Jefferson once said: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything that you have.”
Rating:
Misattributed ( About this rating? )
For years, internet users have made posts on Facebook ( archived ), X , Instagram , and other social media sites sharing a quote they attribute to Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. Founding Father and third president.
(Facebook page I Love the USA)
The quote has typically been worded as follows:
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything that you have.
However, multiple slight variations can also be found. For example, in June 2024, one Threads user posted (archived):
"A government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have. The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases." -- Thomas Jefferson
Similarly, in May 2023, a post ( archived ) by an X user read:
"A government powerful enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have "
Thomas Jefferson
The quote's circulation was not limited to social media. It could also be found on a bumper sticker sold on Amazon, a T-shirt sold on Etsy, and a 4-foot banner sold on the on-demand customized merchandise retailer CafePress.
However, there is no secure evidence that Jefferson ever said any version of the quote, which was declared "fake" by PolitiFact in a 2019 fact check and "spurious" in a post by the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia , a site maintained as part of the official website for Monticello , the Virginia residence designed and inhabited by Jefferson.
As Anne Berkes, the author of the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia post about the quote, noted, the quote appears to have first been attributed to Jefferson in a 2005 quote anthology titled "The Quote Manual: Wisdom and Wit of the Ages" despite having circulated for decades previously without any attribution at all.
For example, Gerald Ford included it a 1974 presidential address to Congress as well as in a 1976 campaign speech . Barry Goldwater is also reported to have used the same turn of phrase in a campaign speech he delivered during his unsuccessful 1964 run for the presidency.
According to the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia post, and backed up by our own research, the earliest securely datable appearance of the quote, or any version close to it, was on p. 57 of "Remember these Things," a 1952 book by the conservative radio personality Paul Harvey.
Like Ford and Goldwater, Harvey did not cite an original author for the quote — although the fact that he placed it in quotation marks in the book suggests that he read or heard it elsewhere, as opposed to coming up with it himself.
(Paul Harvey, "Remember these Things," via Internet Archive)
Lack of citation is not the same thing as hard proof Jefferson never said the quote or a variation thereof. For that reason, Berkes, the author of the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia post, also conducted her own search for the quote in the Jefferson's writings and concluded: "Neither this quotation nor any of its variant forms has been found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson."
Because Berkes did not mention which specific collections of Jefferson's writings she had looked in or which search terms she had used, we conducted our own search using the Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition , published online by the University of Virginia Press. We conducted the same search through the twelve volumes of Paul Leicester Ford's 1904-05 "Works of Thomas Jefferson" as digitized by the Online Library of Liberty.
Since multiple versions of the quote have circulated, we searched for short phrases including "big enough" and "everything [that] you have" rather than any one full version of the quote. Like Berkes, we found no evidence in any of Jefferson's available writings that he had ever written "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything that you have," or any close variation thereof.
Therefore, we have rated this quote as "Misattributed."
Sources:
"Government Big Enough to Give You Everything You Want...(Spurious Quotation)." Monticello, https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/government-big-enough-give-you-everything-you-wantspurious-quotation/#fn-2 . Accessed 11 Sept. 2024.
Moscatelli, Robert G. The Quote Manual: Wisdom and Wit of the Ages. Author House, 2005.
Paul Harvey. Remember These Things. The Heritage Foundation, Inc., 1952. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/rememberthesethi0000paul_q0p8 .
Putterman, Samantha. "That Big Government Quote? Wrong Former President." @politifact, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jun/06/facebook-posts/no-thomas-jefferson-did-not-say-big-government-str/ . Accessed 11 Sept. 2024.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. https://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=TSJN-info-search . Accessed 11 Sept. 2024.
The Presidential Campaign, 1976. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978.
The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12 Vols. | Online Library of Liberty. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ford-the-works-of-thomas-jefferson-12-vols . Accessed 11 Sept. 2024.
Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 1974-08-19: Vol 10 Iss 33. Superintendent of Government Documents, 1974. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/sim_weekly-compilation-of-presidential-documents_1974-08-19_10_33 .
White, Theodore H. (Theodore Harold). The Making of the President, 1964. New York : Atheneum Publishers, 1965. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/makingofpresiden0000unse_c2q8 .
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