Quotes By Thomas Jefferson

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

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

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

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

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.

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

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

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.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

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