Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

261. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

270. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

274. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

276. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

279. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

284. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.”

— Thomas Jefferson

298. “We never repent of having eaten too little.”

— Thomas Jefferson

299. “No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson