“Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.
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Thomas Jefferson
“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“With your talents and industry, with science, and that steadfast honesty, which eternally pursues right, regardless of consequences, you may promise yourself everything but health, without which there is no happiness.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”
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Thomas Jefferson
“our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage,”
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Thomas Jefferson
“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
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Thomas Jefferson
