“When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.”
―
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
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“the measure of society is how it treats the weakest members”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”
―
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
“The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied...and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“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.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
―
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
