Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.”

— Thomas Jefferson

402. “The failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.”

— Thomas Jefferson

403. “I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man.”

— Thomas Jefferson

404. “We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self – government.”

— Thomas Jefferson

405. “Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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406. “Is it less dishonest to do what is wrong because it is not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

407. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen, people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”

— Thomas Jefferson

408. “We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

409. “A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government.”

— Thomas Jefferson

410. “The reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.”

— Thomas Jefferson

411. “Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.”

— Thomas Jefferson

412. “If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear it off.”

— Thomas Jefferson

413. “For Heaven’s sake discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum.”

— Thomas Jefferson

414. “The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam to a carriage on wheels will make a great change in the situation of man.”

— Thomas Jefferson

415. “Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it is what I have steadfastly believed.”

— Thomas Jefferson

416. “Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.”

— Thomas Jefferson

417. “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.”

— Thomas Jefferson

418. “If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

— Thomas Jefferson

419. “I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

— Thomas Jefferson

420. “The execution of the laws is more important than the making of them.”

— Thomas Jefferson

421. “Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.”

— Thomas Jefferson

422. “It will take a thousand years for the frontier to reach the Pacific.”

— Thomas Jefferson

423. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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424. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

426. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

435. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

445. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

447. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

449. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson