“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Whiskey claims to itself alone the exclusive office of sot-making.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing is more likely than that [the] enumeration of powers is defective. This is the ordinary case of all human works. Let us then go on perfecting it by adding by way of amendment to the Constitution those powers which time and trial show are still wanting”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his (sic)patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes. "
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and opressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter, but we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this, the most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (April 11, 1823)”
―
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.”
―
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.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time, and that of 20 aids could effect. For while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented. I have thought it better to trust the justice of my country-men, that they would judge me by what they see of my conduct on the stage where they have placed me.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
―
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
“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
―
Thomas Jefferson