Quotes By Thomas Jefferson

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor - over each other.

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