R.S. Thomas Quotes

I spent a lot of years just learning my craft and falling down in front of the camera.

If I stay alert, then I can challenge myself, and by challenging myself, that helps me to stay alive and to hopefully take something away from the experience.

The people are not always well-informed, but is better that they have misconceptions that make them restless than that they be lethargic-for lethargy in the people means death for republics.

Paper is poverty, it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.

Do not neglect your music. It will be a companion which will sweeten many hours of life to you.

No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap.

Take more pleasure in giving what is best to another than in having it for yourself, and then all the world will love you.

Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.

It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate.

I believe in both a creative and personal God, a divinely ordered universe, that man has an innate moral sense, and that Jesus was a great moral teacher, perhaps the greatest the world has witnessed.

Delay is preferable to error.

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils of misgovernment.

The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.

Legislators invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.

It is a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow their end.

It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united.

If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong.

Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.

Motherhood is the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness.

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.

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.

I hope the necessity will at length be seen of establishing institutions, here as in Europe, where every branch of science, useful at this day, may be taught in it's highest degrees.

The rights of the people to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.

There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.

If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's.

We must use a good deal of economy in our wood, never cutting down new, where we can make the old do.

I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the Union into two or more parts.

Agriculture is at the same time the most tranquil, healthy, and independent occupation.

We are sensible of the duty and expediency of submitting our opinions to the will of the majority, and can wait with patience till they get right if they happen to be at any time wrong.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands.

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

[A]lthough a republican government is slow to move, yet when once in motion, its momentum becomes irresistible.

Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

Cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens.

To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.

Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

A little rebellion is a good thing.

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act.

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

I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.

Our attachment to no nation on earth should supplant our attachment to liberty.

The Declaration of Independence . . . [is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man.

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.

I think all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty.

I never before knew the full value of trees....What would I not give that the trees planted nearest round the house at Monticello were full grown.