“I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no lucture comparable to that of the garden. Sucha a variety of subjeccts, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the succes of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year. Under a total want of demand except for our family table, I am still devoted to the garden.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“It is the duty of every American citizen to take part in a vigorous debate on the issues of the day.”
―
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 subjugation on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it: for man is an imitative animal.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If you want something you’ve never had, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done before.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.”
―
Thomas Jefferson