Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”

— Thomas Jefferson

302. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

304. “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

305. “Dependence leads to subservience.”

— Thomas Jefferson

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Light and liberty go together.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

318. “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

319. “I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?”

— Thomas Jefferson

320. “An acre of the best ground for hemp, is to be selected and sewn in hemp and be kept for a permanent hemp patch.”

— Thomas Jefferson

321. “Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.”

— Thomas Jefferson

322. “A single zealot may commence prosecutor, and better men be his victims.”

— Thomas Jefferson

323. “Nothing can be believed but what one sees, or has from an eye witness.”

— Thomas Jefferson

324. “The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.”

— Thomas Jefferson

325. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

327. “I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times.”

— Thomas Jefferson

328. “We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.”

— Thomas Jefferson

329. “Do not write me studied letters but ramble as you please.”

— Thomas Jefferson

330. “It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order.”

— Thomas Jefferson

331. “A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.”

— Thomas Jefferson

332. “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

333. “Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.”

— Thomas Jefferson

334. “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”

— Thomas Jefferson

335. “Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

336. “A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful Land, traversing all the seas with the rich production of their Industry.”

— Thomas Jefferson

337. “Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree.”

— Thomas Jefferson

338. “A little rebellion is a good thing.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

340. “Every man has a commission to admonish, exhort, convince another of error.”

— Thomas Jefferson

341. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.”

— Thomas Jefferson

342. “I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations – to be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promoting in the long run even the interests of both.”

— Thomas Jefferson

343. “If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.”

— Thomas Jefferson

344. “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is the most unfit man I know for such a place.”

— Thomas Jefferson

345. “Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.”

— Thomas Jefferson

346. “The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.”

— Thomas Jefferson

347. “There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe: the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.”

— Thomas Jefferson

348. “I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented...”

— Thomas Jefferson

349. “Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.”

— Thomas Jefferson

350. “Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

— Thomas Jefferson