Quotes By Thomas Jefferson

The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.

Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.

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.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.

Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

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.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

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.

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.