The contest is not between us and them, but between good and evil, and if those who would fight evil adopt the ways of evil, evil wins.

And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gaycapital [Paris].

My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ...Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.