Thomas Jefferson (?) Quotes

I believe the states can best govern our home concerns, and the general government our foreign ones.

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.

I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude

All power is inherent in the people.

For an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.

A rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive.

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone.

The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys.

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.

The Bible is the cornerstone of liberty.

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

The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.

Good humor is one of the preservatives of our peace and tranquility.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

The sun - my almighty physician.

I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another.

The wise know too well their weakness to assume infallibility; and he who knows most knows best how little he knows.

A strong body makes the mind strong.

The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union.

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.

Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.

Paul was the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

Taste cannot be controlled by law. We must resist at all costs any attempt to regulate our individual freedoms and to legislate our personal moralities.

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.

Those who don’t read the newspapers are better off than those who do insofar as those who know nothing are better off than those whose heads are filled with half-truths and lies.

In a government bottomed on the will of all, the... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.

Never put off your massage until tomorrow if you can get it today.

War...is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.

All authority belongs to the people... In questions of power let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief with chains of the Constitution.

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

Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.

The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.

Our liberty depends on freedom of the press.

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness.

For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.

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.

Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Thinking is like exercise, it requires consistency and rigor. Like barbells in a weightlifting room, the classics force us to either put them down or exert our minds. They require us to think.

There is not a truth existing which I fear... or would wish unknown to the whole world.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people.

One single object . . . [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation.

The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government of the ingredient of republicanism.

The rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.