“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Good humor is one of the preservatives of our peace and tranquility”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowledge can never be lost.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“To the corruptions of christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
