Leadership Quote by George Washington

Jealousy is a fascinating word choice here: Washington isn’t talking about envy in the petty sense, but the anxious possessiveness of a government that can’t stand the idea of citizens acting beyond its leash. By framing preemptive restriction as “unjust and unwise,” he doubles the indictment. It’s not only morally wrong to strip liberty on a hunch; it’s strategically stupid, the kind of fearful overreach that breeds exactly the instability it claims to prevent.

The line is built like an argument you can’t easily wiggle out of. “Natural liberty” invokes Enlightenment language of rights that precede the state, making the deprivation feel like an unnatural act of violence rather than a policy preference. The kicker is “upon the supposition he may abuse it”: Washington targets the logic of hypothetical guilt. If mere possibility is enough to justify control, then freedom exists only at the government’s pleasure, and the burden of proof flips. Citizens must continually prove they won’t misbehave, while power is presumed benevolent.

As a founding-era leader, Washington is also speaking to a fragile republic terrified of disorder, debt, faction, and rebellion. The subtext is a warning to his own side: don’t recreate the paternalistic impulse of the empire you just fought. His rhetorical restraint matters too. No grand poetry, no revolutionary heat - just a calm, almost legal phrasing that treats liberty as the default setting, and suspicion as the dangerous exception.