“In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Enlighten the people, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Of all machines, the human heart is the most complicated and inexplicable.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no lucture comparable to that of the garden. Sucha a variety of subjeccts, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the succes of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year. Under a total want of demand except for our family table, I am still devoted to the garden.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous falacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing was or is farther from my intentions, than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed doubt.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“… the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.”
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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
“Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
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Thomas Jefferson
