“If you want something you’ve never had, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done before.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“[Christianity is] the most ... perverted system that ever shone on man.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“A machine for making revolutions is doing precisely the wrong thing at just the right time.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If all be true that I do think, there are five reasons we should drink. Good friends, good times, or being dry, or lest we should be by and by, or any other reason why”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
