Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights.”

— Thomas Jefferson

202. “To every obstacle oppose patience, perseverance and soothing language.”

— Thomas Jefferson

203. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

— Thomas Jefferson

204. “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!”

— Thomas Jefferson

205. “The Christian god is a being of terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”

— Thomas Jefferson

206. “Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.”

— Thomas Jefferson

207. “The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.”

— Thomas Jefferson

208. “A pirate spreading misery and ruin over the face of the ocean.”

— Thomas Jefferson

209. “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”

— Thomas Jefferson

210. “When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil; while fretting and fuming only serves to increase your own torments.”

— Thomas Jefferson

211. “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”

— Thomas Jefferson

212. “Nobody can acquire honor by doing what is wrong.”

— Thomas Jefferson

213. “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”

— Thomas Jefferson

214. “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

— Thomas Jefferson

215. “I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.”

— Thomas Jefferson

216. “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

218. “Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.”

— Thomas Jefferson

219. “The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.”

— Thomas Jefferson

220. “The colleges of Edinburgh and Geneva as seminaries of science, are considered as the two eyes of Europe. While Great Britain and America give the preference to the former, all other countries give it to the latter.”

— Thomas Jefferson

221. “Above all I hope that the education of the common people will be attended to so they won’t forget the basic principles of freedom.”

— Thomas Jefferson

222. “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

— Thomas Jefferson

223. “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

225. “My heart trembles when I reflect that God is just.”

— Thomas Jefferson

226. “There is a fulness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have a right to advance.”

— Thomas Jefferson

227. “Without virtue, happiness cannot be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

228. “An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.”

— Thomas Jefferson

229. “I extremely believe in luck, and I discovered more hard work, your luck as much.”

— Thomas Jefferson

230. “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.”

— Thomas Jefferson

231. “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”

— Thomas Jefferson

232. “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

233. “A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”

— Thomas Jefferson

234. “I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it’s laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”

— Thomas Jefferson

235. “All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”

— Thomas Jefferson

236. “Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

237. “I deny the power of the general government to making paper money, or anything else a legal tender.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

239. “There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”

— Thomas Jefferson

240. “The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being.”

— Thomas Jefferson

241. “It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers but by their distribution that good government is effected.”

— Thomas Jefferson

242. “We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarrantors of only our own.”

— Thomas Jefferson

243. “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.”

— Thomas Jefferson

244. “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

— Thomas Jefferson

245. “State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”

— Thomas Jefferson

246. “I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”

— Thomas Jefferson

247. “The only way to win money out of a casino is to own one.”

— Thomas Jefferson

248. “The chief purpose of government is to protect life. Abandon that and you have abandoned all.”

— Thomas Jefferson

249. “One never really knows how much one has been touched by a place until one has left it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

250. “If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

— Thomas Jefferson