Quotes By Thomas Jefferson

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

Be polite to all, but intimate with few.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

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

No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

The Creator has not thought proper to mark those in the forehead who are of stuff to make good generals. We are first, therefore, to seek them blindfold, and then let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses.

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities.

The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

Taste cannot be controlled by law.

No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.

When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.

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.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

One man with courage is a majority.

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.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal 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.

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.