Thomas Jefferson Quotes

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.

The happiest hours of my life have been spent in the flow of affection among friends.

Honesty and interest are as intimately connected in the public as in the private code of morality.

No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.

It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.

It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely, and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion.

I know nothing more important to inculcate into the minds of young people than the wisdom, the honor, and the blessed comfort of living within their income.

Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?

As you are entered with the class of Nat. philosophy, give to it the hours of lecture, but devote all your other time to Mathematics, avoiding company as the bane of all progress.

In a government bottomed on the will of all, the... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.

The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution.

Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.

The merchant has no country .

It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterwards. The fortune of our lives therefore depends on employing well the short period of our youth.

Delay is preferable to error.

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It had only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican.

With all the defects in our Constitution, whether general or particular, the comparison of our government with those of Europe, is like a comparison of Heaven with Hell. England, like the earth, may be allowed to take the intermediate station.

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods.

Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by God.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.

The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.

Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its happiness.

He wove those three threads into a talk ranging from annually spending a week at Halloween as a child collecting candy to giving candy to hundreds of children at Halloween as an adult; from childhood assistance he received from adults, particularly after his parents divorced, to saying I challenge you to be a caring adult in someone's life ... Great times call forth great leaders.

Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. For not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. And were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.

I do most anxiously wish to see the highest degrees of education given to the higher degrees of genius and to all degrees of it, so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world and to keep their part of it going on right; for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

One war, such as that of our Revolution, is enough for one life.

It is in the love of one's family only that heartfelt happiness is known.

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.

For an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

I love to see honest and honorable men at the helm, men who will not bend their politics to their purses, nor pursue measures by which they may profit, and then profit by their measures.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

Where thought is free in its range, we need never fear to hazard what is good in itself.

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself.

The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes, and they believe rightly.

For St. Paul only says that it is better to be married than to burn. Now I presume that if that apostle had known that providence would at an after day be so kind to any particular set of people as to furnish them with other means of extinguishing their fire than those of matrimony, he would have earnestly recmmended them to their practice.

[If a book were] very innocent, and one which might be confided to the reason of any man; not likely to be much read if let alone, but if persecuted, it will be generally read. Every man in the United States will think it a duty to buy a copy, in vindication of his right to buy and to read what he pleases.

The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife.

Political interest [can] never be separated in the long run from moral right.

The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.