Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”

— Thomas Jefferson

402. “It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.”

— Thomas Jefferson

403. “I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.”

— Thomas Jefferson

404. “My most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure and perpetual.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

406. “When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.”

— Thomas Jefferson

407. “How sublime to look down on the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!”

— Thomas Jefferson

408. “Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless, by human interposition, disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

410. “Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind.”

— Thomas Jefferson

411. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

444. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

449. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson