Thomas Jefferson Quotes

“The tree of Liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots it is it’s natural manure”! ~Thomas Jefferson

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. Thomas Jefferson

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

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also. Thomas Jefferson

Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government. Thomas Jefferson

Delay is preferable to error. Thomas Jefferson

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. Thomas Jefferson

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it. Thomas Jefferson

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

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

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. Thomas Jefferson

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. Thomas Jefferson

Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. 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

Every generation needs a new revolution. Thomas Jefferson

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

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. 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

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism. Thomas Jefferson

He who knows best knows how little he knows. Thomas Jefferson

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. Thomas Jefferson

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

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. Thomas Jefferson

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

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

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us. Thomas Jefferson

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another. Thomas Jefferson

I cannot live without books. Thomas Jefferson

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. Thomas Jefferson

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. Thomas Jefferson

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. Thomas Jefferson

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office. Thomas Jefferson

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Thomas Jefferson

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

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Thomas Jefferson

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

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. Thomas Jefferson

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. Thomas Jefferson

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. 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

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. Thomas Jefferson

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. Thomas Jefferson

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

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way. 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

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

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? Thomas Jefferson

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. 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

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical (highly unrealistic) idea.
Thomas Jefferson

God... has formed us moral agents ...that we may promote the happiness (virtue) of those with whom He has placed us in a society, by acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacred their rights, bodily and mentally, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own. Thomas Jefferson to Miles King, 1814. ME 14:197

Peace, prosperity, liberty, and morals have an intimate connection.
Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1813. ME:384

The order of nature is that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue. -Thomas Jefferson to M. Correa de Serra, 1814: ME 19:210

"Without virtue, happiness cannot be." --Thomas Jefferson to Amos J. Cook, 1816. ME 14:405

"Liberty... is the great parent of science and of virtue; and... a nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free." --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Willard, 1789. ME 7:329

"Truth is certainly a branch of morality, and a very important one to society." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:139

"Truth is the first object." --Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Maese, 1809. ME 12:232

"Follow truth as the only safe guide, and... eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:234

"He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality... The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call Common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules." --Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, 1787. ME 6:257, Papers 12:15

"How necessary was the care of the Creator in making the moral principle so much a part of our constitution as that no errors of reasoning or of speculation might lead us astray from its observance in practice." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:139

"Morals were too essential to the happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. [Nature] laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in science." --Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786. ME 5:443

"I believe... that [justice] is instinct and innate, that the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing; as a wise Creator must have seen to be necessary in an animal destined to live in society." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1816. ME 15:76

"I sincerely... believe... in the general existence of a moral instinct. I think it the brightest gem with which the human character is studded, and the want of it as more degrading than the most hideous of the bodily deformities." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:143

"The moral sense [is] the first excellence of well-organized man." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1823. ME 15:418

"The moral law of our nature... [is] the moral law to which man has been subjected by his Creator, and of which his feelings or conscience, as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on French Treaties, 1793. ME 3:228

"Conscience [is] the only sure clue which will eternally guide a man clear of all doubts and inconsistencies." --Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1789. ME 7:350, Papers 15:118

"[It is a] general truth that great men will think alike and act alike, though without intercommunication." --Thomas Jefferson to William B. Giles, 1796. ME 9:326

"The true fountains of evidence [are] the head and heart of every rational and honest man. It is there nature has written her moral laws, and where every man may read them for himself." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on French Treaties, 1793. ME 3:229

"Egoism, in a broader sense, has been... presented as the source of moral action. It has been said that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bind up the wounds of the man beaten by thieves, pour oil and wine into them, set him on our own beast and bring him to the inn, because we receive ourselves pleasure from these acts... These good acts give us pleasure, but how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses... The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist had he intended man for a social animal without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man, because there is no rule without exceptions; but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:141

"That a man owes no duty to which he is not urged by some impulsive feeling... is correct, if referred to the standard of general feeling in the given case, and not to the feeling of a single individual." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:144

"Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves, we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly its counterpart." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:140

"The practice of morality being necessary for the well-being of society, [our Creator] has taken care to impress its precepts so indelibly on our hearts that they shall not be effaced by the subtleties of our brain." --Thomas Jefferson to James Fishback, 1809. ME 12:315

"The want or imperfection of the moral sense in some men, like the want or imperfection of the senses of sight and hearing in others, is no proof that it is a general characteristic of the species." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:142

"The non-existence of justice is not to be inferred from the fact that the same act is deemed virtuous and right in one society which is held vicious and wrong in another; because as the circumstances and opinions of different societies vary, so the acts which may do them right or wrong must vary also; for virtue does not consist in the act we do, but in the end it is to effect." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1816. ME 15:76

"Circumstances must always yield to substance." --Thomas Jefferson: Batture at New Orleans, 1812. ME 18:76

"Our part is to pursue with steadiness what is right, turning neither to right nor left for the intrigues or popular delusions of the day, assured that the public approbation will in the end be with us." --Thomas Jefferson to James Breckenridge, 1822. ME 15:363

"A conviction that we are right accomplishes half the difficulty of correcting wrong." --Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Thweat, 1821. ME 15:307

"Everyone is bound to bear witness, where wrong has been done." --Thomas Jefferson: Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 1824. ME 19:449

"The laws of [our] country... in offenses within their cognizance, compel those who have knowledge of a fact to declare it for the purposes of justice and of the general good and safety of society. And certainly, where wrong has been done, he who knows and conceals the doer of it makes himself an accomplice, and justly censurable as such." --Thomas Jefferson: Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 1825. ME 19:469

"A bold, unequivocal virtue is the best handmaid even to ambition, and would carry [one] further, in the end, than [the pursuit of a] temporizing, wavering policy." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1789. ME 7:380, Papers 15:190

"Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them." --Thomas Jefferson to Francois de Marbois, 1817. ME 15:131

"Principle will, in... most... cases open the way for us to correct conclusion." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:71

"Principles conscientiously adopted [should] not be given up." --Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1793. (*) ME 1:332

"When principles are well understood, their application is less embarrassing." --Thomas Jefferson to Gouverneur Morris, 1793. ME 9:36

"A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sin and suffering." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40

"Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom and harmony." --Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1801. ME 10:255

"The only exact testimony of a man is his actions, leaving the reader to pronounce on them his own judgment." --Thomas Jefferson to L. H. Girardin, 1815. ME 14: 295

"Our Saviour... has taught us to judge the tree by its fruit, and to leave motives to Him who can alone see into them." --Thomas Jefferson to Martin Van Buren, 1824. ME 16:55

"The entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant... Everything is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue. When any signal act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary, when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions; and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise. But exercise produces habit, and in the instance of which we speak, the exercise being of the moral feelings, produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously." --Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, 1771. ME 4:237, Papers 1:76

"Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life. Of those recorded by historians few incidents have been attended with such circumstances as to excite in any high degree this sympathetic emotion of virtue. We are, therefore, wisely framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage. The spacious field of imagination is thus laid open to our use, and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the heart every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written." --Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, 1771. ME 4:239, Papers 1:77

"History, in general, only informs us what bad government is." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:223

"The sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:28

"Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:397

"Most virtues when carried beyond certain bounds degenerate into vices." --Thomas Jefferson to Chastellux, 1785.

"It is reasonable that every one who asks justice should do justice." --Thomas Jefferson to George Hammond, 1792. ME 16:227

"The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset." --Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786. ME 5:439

"A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society." --Thomas Jefferson to George Hammond, 1792. ME 16:263

"Moral duties [are] as obligatory on nations as on individuals." --Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1808. ME 1:480

"The laws of humanity make it a duty for nations, as well as individuals, to succor those whom accident and distress have thrown upon them." --Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1807. ME 11:144

"The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature accompany them into a state of society, and the aggregate of the duties of all the individuals composing the society constitutes the duties of that society towards any other; so that between society and society the same moral duties exist as did between the individuals composing them while in an unassociated state, and their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation. Compacts, then, between nation and nation are obligatory on them by the same moral law which obliges individuals to observe their compacts." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on French Treaties, 1793. ME 3:228

"We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals, our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties." --Thomas Jefferson: 2nd Inaugural, 1805. ME 3:375

"Political interest [can] never be separated in the long run from moral right." --Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1806. FE 8:477

"Honesty and interest are as intimately connected in the public as in the private code of morality." --Thomas Jefferson to James Maury, 1815. ME 14:313

"So invariably do the laws of nature create our duties and interests, that when they seem to be at variance, we ought to suspect some fallacy in our reasonings." --Thomas Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Say, 1804. ME 11:3

"I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man." --Thomas Jefferson to Valentine de Foronda, 1809. ME 12:320

"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately." --Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816. FE 10:68

"If the morality of one man produces a just line of conduct in him acting individually, why should not the morality of one hundred men produce a just line of conduct in them acting together?" --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:450, Papers 15:367

"What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789.

"When we come to the moral principles on which the government is to be administered, we come to what is proper for all conditions of society... Liberty, truth, probity (integrity and uprightness; honesty), honor, are declared to be the four cardinal principles of society. I believe... that morality, compassion, generosity, are innate elements of the human constitution; that there exists a right independent of force." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816. ME 14:490

"Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree (for all forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, or bear false witness), and that we should not intermeddle with the particular dogmas in which all religions differ, and which are totally unconnected with morality." --Thomas Jefferson to James Fishback, 1809. ME 12:315

"Is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy." --Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. ME 13:360

An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens. It should be noted, that when Jefferson speaks of "science," he is often referring to knowledge or learning in general.

"I know no safe depositary 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 by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:278

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:207

"The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes." --Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526

"The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom." --Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 1810. ME 12:417

"The diffusion of information and the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government, and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural Address, 1801. ME 3:322

"Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on Apportionment Bill, 1792. ME 3:211

"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 to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384

"Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree." --Thomas Jefferson to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 1805.

"No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity." --Thomas Jefferson: Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 1821. ME 19:408

"Light and liberty go together." --Thomas Jefferson to Tench Coxe, 1795.

"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Madison Version FE 4:480

"[I have] a conviction that science is important to the preservation of our republican government, and that it is also essential to its protection against foreign power." --Thomas Jefferson to -----, 1821. ME 15:340

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789. ME 7:253

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” (Quoting Cesare Beccaria)

The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.

The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. (Back then!)