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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

259. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

271. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

275. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

285. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

288. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

292. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

294. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

297. “Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.”

— Thomas Jefferson

298. “Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.”

— 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. “The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticism, fancies, and falsehoods.”

— Thomas Jefferson