Information More Important Than Government?

Thomas Jefferson deplored "the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed." And yet he believed it was better to have "newspapers without a government" than "a government without newspapers."

Perhaps that's unsurprising from a man whose personal library became the founding collection of the rebuilt Library of Congress. A man of books understood that if you had to choose between information about the world and a government to govern it, information would do more to shape how people actually lived.

A man who deplored the press still trusted it more than he trusted power.

(Quotes from John P. Kaminski's The Quotable Jefferson.)