Thomas Jefferson Quotes

994 Sourced Quotes

The colleges of Edinburgh and Geneva as seminaries of science, are considered as the two eyes of Europe. While Great Britain and America give the preference to the former, all other countries give it to the latter.

Thomas Jefferson
Without society, and a society to our taste, men are never contented.

Thomas Jefferson
No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.

Thomas Jefferson
No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.

Thomas Jefferson
Agreeable society is the first essential in constituting the happiness and of course the value of our existence.

Thomas Jefferson
An industrious farmer occupies a more dignified place in the scale of beings...than a lazy lounger...too proud to work, and drawing out a miserable existence by eating on that surplus of other men's labor.

Thomas Jefferson
The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpationsall of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.

Thomas Jefferson
I will now add what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of nations.

Thomas Jefferson
Unmerited abuse wounds, while unmerited praise has not the power to heal.

Thomas Jefferson
I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.

Thomas Jefferson
You have never by a word or a deed given me one moment's uneasiness; on the contrary I have felt perpetual gratitude to heaven forhaving given me, in you, a source of so much pure and unmixed happiness.

Thomas Jefferson
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.

Thomas Jefferson
Nothing was or is farther from my intentions, than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed doubt.

Thomas Jefferson
The President is bound to stop at the limits prescribed by our Constitution and law to the authorities in his hands, [and this] would apply in an occasion of peace as well as war.

Thomas Jefferson
If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.

Thomas Jefferson
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.

Thomas Jefferson
We generally learn languages for the benefit of reading the books written in them

Thomas Jefferson
My general plan would be to make the States one as to everything connected with foreign nations and several as to everything purely domestic.

Thomas Jefferson
By nature's law, man is at peace with man till some aggression is
committed, which, by the same law, authorizes one to destroy another as
his enemy.

Thomas Jefferson
When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches.

Thomas Jefferson
I have come to a resolution myself as I hope every good citizen will, never again to purchase any article of foreign manufacture which can be had of American make, be the difference of price what it may.

Thomas Jefferson
A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.

Thomas Jefferson
The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.

Thomas Jefferson
The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery.

Thomas Jefferson
At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams.

Thomas Jefferson
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.

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

Thomas Jefferson
Our ancestors... possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them.

Thomas Jefferson
I deem it the duty of every man to devote a certain portion of his income for charitable purposes; and that it is his further duty to see it so applied and to do the most good for which it is capable.

Thomas Jefferson
Should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price.

Thomas Jefferson