Thomas Jefferson Quotes

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The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.

Thomas Jefferson
I have the consolation to reflect that during the period of my administration not a drop of the blood of a single fellow citizen was shed by the sword of war or of the law.

Thomas Jefferson
Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.

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

Thomas Jefferson
On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already?

Thomas Jefferson
No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.

Thomas Jefferson
When we come to the moral principles on which the government is to be administered, we come to what is proper for all conditions of society. Liberty, truth, probity, honor, are declared to be the four cardinal principles of society. I believe that morality, compassion, generosity, are innate elements of the human constitution; that there exists a right independent of force.

Thomas Jefferson
I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles.

Thomas Jefferson
It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.

Thomas Jefferson
I hold the precepts of Jesus as delivered by Himself, to be the most pure, benevolent and sublime which have ever been preached to man...

Thomas Jefferson
No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it. The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.

Thomas Jefferson
We love and we value peace; we know its blessings from experience. We abhor the follies of war, and are not untried in its distresses and calamities.

Thomas Jefferson
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Thomas Jefferson
Yours of July 27 is received. It confirms the accounts we receive from others that the infractions of the embargo in Maine and Massachusetts are open. I have removed Pope, of New Bedford, for worse than negligence. The collector of Sullivan is on the totter. The Tories of Boston openly threaten insurrection if their importation of flour is stopped. The next post will stop it. I fear your Governor [Sullivan] is not up to the tone of these parricides, and I hope on the first symptom of an open opposition of the law by force you will fly to the scene, and aid in suppressing any commotion.

Thomas Jefferson
I... [am] convinced [man] has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Thomas Jefferson
In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.

Thomas Jefferson
Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons.

Thomas Jefferson
My construction of the constitution is very different from that you quote. It is that each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal.

Thomas Jefferson
The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.

Thomas Jefferson
To instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens...this brings us to the point at which are to commence the higher branches of education.... To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.

Thomas Jefferson
In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

Thomas Jefferson
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.

Thomas Jefferson
What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.

Thomas Jefferson
I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the mockingbird. Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs.

Thomas Jefferson
My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!

Thomas Jefferson
The genuine and simple religion of Jesus will one day be restored: such as it was preached and practiced by Himself.

Thomas Jefferson
Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.

Thomas Jefferson
Besides the comfort of knowlege, every science is auxiliary to every other.

Thomas Jefferson
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson
The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

Thomas Jefferson