“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.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God?”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."
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Thomas Jefferson
“That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“[A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterward.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
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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.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. the same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the (best men; nobles) should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and rome in eternal convulsions...”
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Thomas Jefferson
