Thomas Jefferson Quotes

The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible.

This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe. at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together.

The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.

The objects of this primary education . . . would be . . . to form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend.

We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.

Without books, I would certainly die.

It [appears] that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknowledged. Thinking men of all nations rallied readily to the doctrine of one only God, and embraced it with the pure-morals which Jesus inculcated.

SIR,-Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied it, of Doctor Rush's answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as a history of my own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating very little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principle diet.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living. . . . We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another. . . . The earth belongs always to the living generations.

An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to God alone.

My great wish is to go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty; to avoid attracting notice, and to keep my name out of the newspapers.

The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys.

I am convinced that those societies (such as the Native American peoples) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, & restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not exaggerate.

The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.

Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.

preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people.

Our liberty depends on freedom of the press.

I rejoice when I hear of young men of virtue and talents, worthy to receive and likely to preserve the splendid inheritance of self- government, which we have acquired and shaped for them.

I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand.

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone.

Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

Yet by such worthless beings is a great nation to be governed and even made to deify their old king because he is only a fool and a maniac, and to forgive and forget his having lost to them a great and flourishing empire.

During the late war I had an infallible rule for deciding what Great Britain would do on every occasion. It was, to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do, and I can say with truth that I was never deceived.

I hold it to be one of the distinguishing excellences of elective over hereditary successions that the talents which nature has provided in sufficient proportion, should be selected by the society for the govenment of their affairs, rather than that this should be be transmitted through the loins of knaves and fools passing from the debauches of the table to those of the bed.

The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.

The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information.

With your talents and industry, with science, and that steadfast honesty which eternally pursues right, regardless of consequences, you may promise yourself every thing-but health, without which there is no happiness. An attention to health then should take place of evey other object. The time necessary to secure this by active exercises, should be devoted to it in preference to every other pursuit.

Anarchy [is] necessarily consequent to inefficiency.

The sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also.

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.

The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.

Every honest man will suppose honest acts to flow from honest principles, and the rogues may rail without intermission.

If you are obliged to neglect any thing, let it be your chemistry. It is the least useful and the least amusing to a country gentleman of all the ordinary branches of science.

I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.

The provisions we have made [for our government] are such as please ourselves; they answer the substantial purposes of government and of justice, and other purposes than these should not be answered.

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticism, fancies, and falsehoods.

Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules. That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit, will certainly be the aim of our legislatures, general and particular.

A private central bank issuing the public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army. We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

I endeavor to keep their attention fixed on the main objects of all science, the freedom & happiness of man.