Claims that Thomas Jefferson said, "Most bad government has grown out of too much government."
There seems to be a cottage industry in misquoting Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t say, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." Nor, "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government," nor any variations of those or dozens of other pithy phrases wrongly attributed to our illustrious third president. [...] Cain said that Thomas Jefferson said, "You might be able to fool the people for a while, and they may go astray, but sooner or later the American people are going to wake up and they will correct the course." Jefferson did write a line that resembles that in some important ways, but Cain put a fair number of words into Jefferson’s mouth. At PunditFact, we believe quotations should be relatively word-for-word accurate. If someone went to the trouble to leave their thoughts for posterity, the least we should do is honor what they actually said. [...] Wall Street Journal, To Quote Thomas Jefferson, 'I Never Actually Said That', Dec. 6, 2012