Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “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

302. “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

303. “No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity.”

— Thomas Jefferson

304. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

308. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

312. “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

313. “Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

315. “I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.”

— Thomas Jefferson

316. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

318. “Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

320. “A noiseless course, not meddling with the affairs of others, unattractive of notice, is a mark that society is going on in happiness. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

321. “The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

— Thomas Jefferson

322. “Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment.”

— Thomas Jefferson

323. “Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”

— Thomas Jefferson

324. “Bind them down by the chains of the Constitution where they can do no mischief.”

— Thomas Jefferson

325. “We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.”

— Thomas Jefferson

326. “Dependence leads to subservience.”

— Thomas Jefferson

327. “Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.”

— Thomas Jefferson

328. “Every experience deeply felt in life needs to be passed along. Wheather it be through words and music, chiseled in stone, painted with a brush, or sewn with a needle, it is a way of reaching for immortality.”

— Thomas Jefferson

329. “It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

330. “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”

— Thomas Jefferson

331. “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”

— Thomas Jefferson

332. “I am sure that in estimating every man’s value either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and that learning and talents are only the second.”

— Thomas Jefferson

333. “The sun – my almighty physician.”

— Thomas Jefferson

334. “I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Featured in: Book Quotes

335. “The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.”

— Thomas Jefferson

336. “Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.”

— Thomas Jefferson

337. “It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.”

— Thomas Jefferson

338. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight.”

— Thomas Jefferson

339. “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

— Thomas Jefferson

340. “I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”

— Thomas Jefferson

341. “No stile of writing is so delightful as that which is all pith, which never omits a necessary word, nor uses an unnecessary one.”

— Thomas Jefferson

342. “From candlelight to early bedtime, I read.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

343. “My principle is to do whatever is right, and leave consequences to him who has the disposal of them.”

— Thomas Jefferson

344. “Question with boldness even the existence of a god.”

— Thomas Jefferson

345. “With all the imperfections of our present government, it is without comparison the best existing, or that ever did exist.”

— Thomas Jefferson

346. “Light and liberty go together.”

— Thomas Jefferson

347. “There is no King, who, with sufficient force, is not always ready to make himself absolute.”

— Thomas Jefferson

348. “So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.”

— Thomas Jefferson

349. “The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes – the laboring and the learned. The laboring will need the first grade of education to qualify them for their pursuits and duties; the learned will need it as a foundation for further acquirements.”

— Thomas Jefferson

350. “Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.”

— Thomas Jefferson