Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman’s.”

— Thomas Jefferson

402. “Let common sense and common honesty have fair play, and they will soon set things to rights.”

— Thomas Jefferson

403. “Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.”

— Thomas Jefferson

404. “Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.”

— Thomas Jefferson

405. “The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”

— Thomas Jefferson

406. “The cement of this union is in the heart blood of every American. I do not believe there is on earth a government established on so immovable a basis.”

— Thomas Jefferson

407. “Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.”

— Thomas Jefferson

408. “Whiskey claims to itself alone the exclusive office of sot-making.”

— Thomas Jefferson

409. “Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.”

— Thomas Jefferson

410. “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

411. “What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.”

— Thomas Jefferson

412. “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.”

— Thomas Jefferson

413. “On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally’s cellar.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

415. “Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.”

— Thomas Jefferson

416. “We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication .”

— Thomas Jefferson

417. “The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

418. “The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.”

— Thomas Jefferson

419. “The last hope of human liberty in this world rests on us.”

— Thomas Jefferson

420. “Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.”

— Thomas Jefferson

421. “It look like the lord just work for wite folks cause ever sens i wasn nothin but a litle boy i been on my on haulin water to the fiel on that ol water cart wit all them dime bukets an that dipper just hittin an old dorthy just trottin and trottin an me up their hittin her wit that rope...”

— Thomas Jefferson

422. “I have so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government, that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force.”

— Thomas Jefferson

423. “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.”

— Thomas Jefferson

424. “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.”

— Thomas Jefferson

425. “If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?”

— Thomas Jefferson

426. “That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.”

— Thomas Jefferson

427. “The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

429. “Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable for, not the rightness, but the uprightness of the decision.”

— Thomas Jefferson

430. “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

431. “For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.”

— Thomas Jefferson

432. “Those who don’t read the newspapers are better off than those who do insofar as those who know nothing are better off than those whose heads are filled with half-truths and lies.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

435. “I pledge undying hostility to any government restrictions on the free minds of the people.”

— Thomas Jefferson

436. “The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.”

— Thomas Jefferson

437. “No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”

— Thomas Jefferson

438. “The bloom of Monticello is chilled by my solitude.”

— Thomas Jefferson

439. “It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.”

— Thomas Jefferson

440. “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.”

— Thomas Jefferson

441. “A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”

— Thomas Jefferson

442. “There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.”

— Thomas Jefferson

443. “We see the wisdom of Solon’s remark, that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear.”

— Thomas Jefferson

444. “Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.”

— Thomas Jefferson

445. “This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.”

— Thomas Jefferson

446. “Easter was when they nailed Him to the cross. And He never said a mumbling word.”

— Thomas Jefferson

447. “Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

448. “I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality.”

— Thomas Jefferson

449. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson