Thomas Jefferson Quotes

994 Sourced Quotes

The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. they are the result of habit and long training.

Thomas Jefferson
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and governments to gain ground.

Thomas Jefferson
Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

Thomas Jefferson
A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one.

Thomas Jefferson
The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in-as-much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors.

Thomas Jefferson
Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Thomas Jefferson
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.

Thomas Jefferson
An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental.

Thomas Jefferson
Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.

Thomas Jefferson
England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Thomas Jefferson
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.

Thomas Jefferson
By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice.

Thomas Jefferson
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Thomas Jefferson
May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Thomas Jefferson
It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail.

Thomas Jefferson
Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.

Thomas Jefferson
Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.

Thomas Jefferson
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.

Thomas Jefferson
I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Thomas Jefferson
I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

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

Thomas Jefferson
Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

Thomas Jefferson
When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, he has a right to his opinion, as I to mine. Why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion?...Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.

Thomas Jefferson
The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.

Thomas Jefferson
Scenes are now to take place as will open the eyes of credulity and of insanity itself, to the dangers of a paper medium abandoned to the discretion of avarice and of swindlers.

Thomas Jefferson
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.

Thomas Jefferson
We exist, and are quoted, as standing proofs that a government, so modeled as to rest continually on the will of the whole society, is a practicable government.

Thomas Jefferson
War...is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.

Thomas Jefferson
Our opinion here is that that place has been so deeply concerned in smuggling, that if it wants it is because it has illegally sent away what it ought to have retained for its own consumption.

Thomas Jefferson
The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.

Thomas Jefferson