Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”

— Thomas Jefferson

203. “Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”

— Thomas Jefferson

204. “Victory and defeat are each of the same price.”

— Thomas Jefferson

205. “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.”

— Thomas Jefferson

206. “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God.”

— Thomas Jefferson

207. “Without virtue, happiness cannot be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

208. “No government can continue good, but under the control of the people.”

— Thomas Jefferson

209. “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

210. “The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.”

— Thomas Jefferson

211. “History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”

— Thomas Jefferson

212. “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

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213. “Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its happiness.”

— Thomas Jefferson

214. “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

217. “Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art. To give praise where it is not due, might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

219. “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

220. “All through your life, you’ll be faced with making a decision between two things-choose the one that is right. If they are both right, then choose the one that will make you feel the best about it at the end of the day.”

— Thomas Jefferson

221. “The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

— Thomas Jefferson

222. “It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.”

— Thomas Jefferson

223. “Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights.”

— Thomas Jefferson

224. “I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word in only one way.”

— Thomas Jefferson

225. “If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

227. “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

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228. “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”

— Thomas Jefferson

229. “Power is not alluring to pure minds.”

— Thomas Jefferson

230. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

233. “The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.”

— Thomas Jefferson

234. “I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.”

— Thomas Jefferson

235. “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

236. “Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.”

— Thomas Jefferson

237. “Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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239. “The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.”

— Thomas Jefferson

240. “Man is not made for the State but the State for man and it derives its just powers only from the consent of the governed.”

— Thomas Jefferson

241. “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.”

— Thomas Jefferson

242. “Money, not morality, constitutes the principle of commercial nations.”

— Thomas Jefferson

243. “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

244. “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”

— Thomas Jefferson

245. “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

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246. “Beer, if drank with moderation, softens the temper, cheers the spirit, and promotes health.”

— Thomas Jefferson

247. “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

249. “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

— Thomas Jefferson

250. “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