“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.
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Thomas Jefferson
“Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“They (religions) dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."
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Thomas Jefferson
“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“when you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on”
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Thomas Jefferson
“If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“...it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The most fortunate of us all in our journey through life frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which greatly afflict us. To fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
