§ Message № where-press-is-free · Press Lens

Where the Press Is Free.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Lafayette · 1823

Where the Press Is Free., Quorum

Jefferson's condition.

Jefferson's line is a conditional: where the press is free and people can read, all is safe. The safety of the republic is made to depend on two things, a free press and a literate public.

Why we kept the clause.

The full sentence ties press freedom to literacy, journalism to readership. Quorum keeps the conditional intact because the condition is the argument. A free press only protects a country that reads it.

How we set it.

A longer editorial lockup in Fraunces, "Free" lifted into the soft italic. The line is set the way Jefferson wrote it, as a measured sentence rather than a slogan.