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.
Thomas Jefferson
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
Thomas Jefferson
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
Thomas Jefferson
It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
Thomas Jefferson
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
Thomas Jefferson
For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.
Thomas Jefferson
None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important.
Thomas Jefferson
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Thomas Jefferson
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Thomas Jefferson
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
Thomas Jefferson
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
Thomas Jefferson
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Thomas Jefferson
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Thomas Jefferson
No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.
Thomas Jefferson