Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

254. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

256. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

264. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

266. “The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

— Thomas Jefferson

267. “But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.”

— Thomas Jefferson

268. “Truth between candid minds can never do harm.”

— Thomas Jefferson

269. “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.”

— Thomas Jefferson

270. “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.”

— Thomas Jefferson

271. “Every gentleman plays billiards, but someone who plays billiards too well, is no gentleman.”

— Thomas Jefferson

272. “A good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies. Persuasion, perseverance and patience are the best advocates on questions depending on the will of others.”

— Thomas Jefferson

273. “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.”

— Thomas Jefferson

274. “Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”

— Thomas Jefferson

275. “Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art .”

— Thomas Jefferson

276. “I like my coffee like I like my women.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

278. “Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.”

— Thomas Jefferson

279. “Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.”

— Thomas Jefferson

280. “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”

— Thomas Jefferson

281. “The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

283. “In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve.”

— Thomas Jefferson

284. “The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It had only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican.”

— Thomas Jefferson

285. “I have great confidence in the common sense of mankind in general.”

— Thomas Jefferson

286. “Tranquility is the old man’s milk.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

288. “I love peace, and am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.”

— Thomas Jefferson

289. “Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow.”

— Thomas Jefferson

290. “No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

292. “I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man.”

— Thomas Jefferson

293. “Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.”

— Thomas Jefferson

294. “Wine brightens the life and thinking of anyone.”

— Thomas Jefferson

295. “The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.”

— Thomas Jefferson

296. “It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

298. “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.”

— Thomas Jefferson

299. “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

— Thomas Jefferson

300. “I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance.”

— Thomas Jefferson