Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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.”

— Thomas Jefferson

452. “A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”

— Thomas Jefferson

453. “The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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454. “That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.”

— Thomas Jefferson

455. “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.”

— Thomas Jefferson

456. “It look like the lord just work for wite folks cause ever sens i wasn nothin but a litle boy i been on my on haulin water to the fiel on that ol water cart wit all them dime bukets an that dipper just hittin an old dorthy just trottin and trottin an me up their hittin her wit that rope...”

— Thomas Jefferson

457. “I have so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government, that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force.”

— Thomas Jefferson

458. “The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

461. “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

462. “Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable for, not the rightness, but the uprightness of the decision.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

464. “The bloom of Monticello is chilled by my solitude.”

— Thomas Jefferson

465. “No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”

— Thomas Jefferson

466. “There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

468. “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

469. “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

470. “I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality.”

— Thomas Jefferson

471. “The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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472. “It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.”

— Thomas Jefferson

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

480. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

Featured in: Country Quotes

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson