“All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“...as we advance in life these things fall off one by one , and I suspect we are left with only Homer and Virgil, perhaps with only Homer alone.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.”
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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
“That one generation of men in civil society have no right to make acts to bind another, is a truth that cannot be confused.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.”
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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.”
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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 would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
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Thomas Jefferson
