Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

303. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

308. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

310. “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

311. “Dependence leads to subservience.”

— Thomas Jefferson

312. “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

313. “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

314. “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor I.”

— Thomas Jefferson

315. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

322. “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

323. “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

324. “Light and liberty go together.”

— Thomas Jefferson

325. “It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

339. “I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.”

— Thomas Jefferson

340. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

343. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

345. “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

346. “Truth and reason are eternal. They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail; however, in times and places they may be overborne for a while by violence, military, civil, or ecclesiastical.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

350. “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