Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A candle loses nothing when it lights another candle.”

— Thomas Jefferson

52. “When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

53. “The best defense of democracy is an informed electorate.”

— Thomas Jefferson

54. “Without health there is no happiness. An attention to health, then, should take the place of every other object.”

— Thomas Jefferson

55. “The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.”

— Thomas Jefferson

56. “I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

— Thomas Jefferson

57. “The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

— Thomas Jefferson

58. “If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t more people happy?”

— Thomas Jefferson

59. “When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither.”

— Thomas Jefferson

60. “All men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

— Thomas Jefferson

61. “The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

— Thomas Jefferson

62. “It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”

— Thomas Jefferson

63. “If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

— Thomas Jefferson

64. “No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence.”

— Thomas Jefferson

65. “Hemp is one of the greatest, most important substances of our nation.”

— Thomas Jefferson

66. “Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.”

— Thomas Jefferson

67. “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

68. “Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.”

— Thomas Jefferson

69. “Coffee – the favorite drink of the civilized world.”

— Thomas Jefferson

70. “We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”

— Thomas Jefferson

71. “The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.”

— Thomas Jefferson

72. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

— Thomas Jefferson

73. “When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.”

— Thomas Jefferson

74. “We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest.”

— Thomas Jefferson

75. “Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!”

— Thomas Jefferson

76. “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”

— Thomas Jefferson

77. “The contest is not between us and them, but between good and evil, and if those who would fight evil adopt the ways of evil, evil wins.”

— Thomas Jefferson

78. “If you have to eat crow, eat it while it’s young and tender.”

— Thomas Jefferson

79. “It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason as to administer medication to the dead.”

— Thomas Jefferson

80. “Never use two words when one will do.”

— Thomas Jefferson

81. “Everything yields to diligence.”

— Thomas Jefferson

82. “He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time.”

— Thomas Jefferson

83. “Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body, cheerfulness of mind, and these make us precious to our friends.”

— Thomas Jefferson

84. “Eternal Vigilance is the price of democracy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

85. “The greatest calamity which could befall us would be submission to a government of unlimited powers.”

— Thomas Jefferson

86. “He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

— Thomas Jefferson

87. “Freedom, the first-born of science.”

— Thomas Jefferson

88. “A Man’s management of his own purse speaks volumes about character.”

— Thomas Jefferson

89. “God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.”

— Thomas Jefferson

90. “Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.”

— Thomas Jefferson

91. “Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself.”

— Thomas Jefferson

92. “Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

94. “The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution.”

— Thomas Jefferson

95. “Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.”

— Thomas Jefferson

96. “The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”

— Thomas Jefferson

97. “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

— Thomas Jefferson

98. “No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.”

— Thomas Jefferson

99. “We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists.”

— Thomas Jefferson

100. “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.”

— Thomas Jefferson