“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“[A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.”
―
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.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I consider him [Alexander von Humboldt] the most important scientist whom I have met.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
