Information is the currency of democracy.
- Thomas Jefferson
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted
with the government of himself.
Can he, then be trusted with the government of others?
Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him?
Let history answer this question.
- Thomas Jefferson
Question with boldness even the existence of a God;
because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blind-folded fear.
- Thomas Jefferson
The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.
- Thomas Jefferson
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God
is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
- Thomas Jefferson
The natural cause of the human mind
is certainly from credulity to skepticism.
- Thomas Jefferson
Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone
I love not to mix with it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Speeches that are measured by the hour
will die with the hour.
- Thomas Jefferson
In every country and every age,
the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.
The several sects perform the office of a Censor -
over each other.
- Thomas Jefferson
Advertisements contain the only truths
to be relied on in a newspaper.
- Thomas Jefferson
I never considered a difference of opinion
in politics, in religion, in philosophy,
as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
- Thomas Jefferson
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure,
till you know there is no hook beneath it.
- Thomas Jefferson
The man who reads nothing at all
is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
- Thomas Jefferson
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations;
entangling alliances with none.
- Thomas Jefferson
The moment a person forms a theory,
his imagination sees in every object
only the traits which favor that theory.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is neither wealth nor splendor;
but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.
- Thomas Jefferson
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold
is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
- Thomas Jefferson
We are not afraid to follow truth
wherever it may lead,
nor to tolerate any error
so long as reason is left free to combat it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect,
but of all human contemplations,
the most abhorrent is body without mind.
- Thomas Jefferson
It takes time to persuade men to do even
what is for their own good.
- Thomas Jefferson
I find that he is happiest
of whom the world says least, good or bad.
- Thomas Jefferson
We are not to expect to be translated from
despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
- Thomas Jefferson
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions,
but laws and institutions must go hand in hand
with the progress of the human mind.
As that becomes more developed, more enlightened,
as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered
and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances,
institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.
- Thomas Jefferson [inscribed in the Jefferson Memorial]
The Creator has not thought proper
to mark those in the forehead
who are of stuff to make good generals.
We are first, therefore, to seek them blindfold,
and then let them learn the trade
at the expense of great losses.
- Thomas Jefferson
An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.
- Thomas Jefferson
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
- Thomas Jefferson
(also attributed to Benjamin Franklin and Lord Chesterfield)
I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance
or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.
- Thomas Jefferson
I find that the harder I work,
the more luck I seem to have.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is more dangerous that even
a guilty person should be punished
without the forms of law
than that he should escape.
- Thomas Jefferson
Every government degenerates when trusted
to the rulers of the people alone.
The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
- Thomas Jefferson
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy,
and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
- Thomas Jefferson
An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.
- Thomas Jefferson
The second office in the government is honorable and easy;
the first is but a splendid misery.
- Thomas Jefferson
There is a natural aristocracy among men.
The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
- Thomas Jefferson
Enlighten the people generally,
and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind
will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
- Thomas Jefferson
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
- Thomas Jefferson
I am a great believer in luck
and I find that the harder
I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government
results from too much government.
- Thomas Jefferson
How much pain they have cost us,
the evils which have never happened.
- Thomas Jefferson
We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is always better to have no ideas than false ones;
to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.
- Thomas Jefferson
I hope we shall crush in its birth
the aristocracy of our monied corporations
which dare already to challenge our government
to a trial by strength,
and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
- Thomas Jefferson (from a letter to George Logan, Nov. 12th, 1816)
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
- Thomas Jefferson
War is an instrument entirely inefficient
toward redressing wrong;
and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
- Thomas Jefferson
Liberty is to the collective body,
what health is to every individual body.
Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man;
without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
- Thomas Jefferson
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be.
- Thomas Jefferson
Every citizen should be a soldier.
This was the case with the Greeks and Romans,
and must be that of every free state.
- Thomas Jefferson
I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.
- Thomas Jefferson
The good opinion of mankind,
like the lever of Archimedes,
with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is incumbent on every generation
to pay its own debts as it goes.
A principle which if acted on would
save one-half the wars of the world.
- Thomas Jefferson
As our enemies have found, we can reason like men,
so now let us show them we can fight like men also.
- 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
It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war;
but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on,
we must defend ourselves.
If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether
it was fired from within or without,
we must try to extinguish it.
- Thomas Jefferson
No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying
as to put the right man in the right place.
- Thomas Jefferson
The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which
it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters.
- Thomas Jefferson
When a man assumes a public trust
he should consider himself a public property.
- Thomas Jefferson
The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
- Thomas Jefferson
In matters of style, swim with the current;
in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
- Thomas Jefferson
To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness,
the general mind must be strengthened by education.
- Thomas Jefferson
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month,
and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
- Thomas Jefferson
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself,
to resist invasions of it in the case of others:
or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
- Thomas Jefferson
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth
than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
- Thomas Jefferson
I sincerely believe that banking establishments
are more dangerous than standing armies,
and that the principle of spending money
to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding,
is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
- Thomas Jefferson
Experience demands that man is
the only animal which devours his own kind,
for I can apply no milder term to
the general prey of the rich on the poor.
- Thomas Jefferson
Mankind are more disposed to suffer,
while evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing
the forms to which they are accustomed.
- Thomas Jefferson
No government ought to be without censors;
and where the press is free no one ever will.
- Thomas Jefferson
I believe that every human mind feels pleasure
in doing good to another.
- Thomas Jefferson
The natural progress of things is for liberty
to yield and government to gain ground.
- Thomas Jefferson
An association of men who will not quarrel with one another
is a thing which has never yet existed,
from the greatest confederacy of nations
down to a town meeting or a vestry.
- Thomas Jefferson
I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government.
It is always oppressive.
- Thomas Jefferson
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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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