Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.”

— Thomas Jefferson

452. “Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

453. “The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

— Thomas Jefferson

454. “Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.”

— Thomas Jefferson

455. “Easter was when they nailed Him to the cross. And He never said a mumbling word.”

— Thomas Jefferson

456. “The sun – my almighty physician.”

— Thomas Jefferson

457. “The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.”

— Thomas Jefferson

458. “This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.”

— Thomas Jefferson

459. “History teaches the young the virtues of freedom. By apprising them of the past it will enable them to judge the future.”

— Thomas Jefferson

460. “Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is in their interest to go to war.”

— Thomas Jefferson

461. “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”

— Thomas Jefferson

462. “It may be regarded as certain that not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians without their own consent.”

— Thomas Jefferson

463. “I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”

— Thomas Jefferson

464. “To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.”

— Thomas Jefferson

465. “From candlelight to early bedtime, I read.”

— Thomas Jefferson

466. “The people cannot be all, and always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.”

— Thomas Jefferson

467. “There is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose.”

— Thomas Jefferson

468. “Malice will always find bad motives for good actions. – Shall we therefore never do good?”

— Thomas Jefferson

469. “The hole and the patch should be commensurate.”

— Thomas Jefferson

470. “With all the imperfections of our present government, it is without comparison the best existing, or that ever did exist.”

— Thomas Jefferson

471. “Question with boldness even the existence of a god.”

— Thomas Jefferson

472. “The same political parties which now agitiate the US have existed through all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.”

— Thomas Jefferson

473. “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”

— Thomas Jefferson

474. “But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.”

— Thomas Jefferson

475. “A cold-blooded, calculation, unprincipled, usurper, without a virtue, no statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil government, and supplying ignorance by bold presumption.”

— Thomas Jefferson

476. “Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.”

— Thomas Jefferson

477. “The law of self-preservation is higher than written law.”

— Thomas Jefferson

478. “Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.”

— Thomas Jefferson

479. “Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.”

— Thomas Jefferson

480. “The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it; but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.”

— Thomas Jefferson

481. “Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.”

— Thomas Jefferson

482. “He does most in God’s great world who does his best in his own little world.”

— Thomas Jefferson

483. “Lethargy is the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”

— Thomas Jefferson

484. “The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

487. “It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail.”

— Thomas Jefferson

488. “In a virtuous government, and more especially in times like these, public offices are what they should be – burdens to those appointed to them which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring them intense labor and great private loss.”

— Thomas Jefferson

489. “I hold the precepts of Jesus as delivered by Himself, to be the most pure, benevolent and sublime which have ever been preached to man...”

— Thomas Jefferson

490. “If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope that common sense will suffice to do everything else.”

— Thomas Jefferson

491. “I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.”

— Thomas Jefferson

492. “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

— Thomas Jefferson

493. “Heliotrope. To be sowed in the spring. A delicious flower, but I suspect it must be planted in boxes and kept in the house in the winter. The smell rewards the care.”

— Thomas Jefferson

494. “The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes – the laboring and the learned. The laboring will need the first grade of education to qualify them for their pursuits and duties; the learned will need it as a foundation for further acquirements.”

— Thomas Jefferson

495. “Cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens.”

— Thomas Jefferson

496. “The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts.”

— Thomas Jefferson

497. “The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”

— Thomas Jefferson

498. “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.”

— Thomas Jefferson

499. “The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.”

— Thomas Jefferson

500. “But under the beaming, constant and almost vertical sun of Virginia, shade is our Elysium. In the absence of this no beauty of the eye can be enjoyed.”

— Thomas Jefferson