“But under the beaming, constant and almost vertical sun of Virginia, shade is our Elysium. In the absence of this no beauty of the eye can be enjoyed.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“I leave the world and its affairs to the young and energetic, and resign myself to their care, of whom I have endeavored to take care when young.”
“Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.”
“Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.”
“No government can continue good, but under the control of the people.”
“The sun – my almighty physician.”
“All power is inherent in the people.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.”
“The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”
“A man’s moral sense must be unusually strong if slavery does not make him a thief.”
“But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.”
“Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.”
“Heliotrope. To be sowed in the spring. A delicious flower, but I suspect it must be planted in boxes and kept in the house in the winter. The smell rewards the care.”
“Merchants have no country.”
“The sickly, weakly, timid man fears the people, and is a Tory by nature. The healthy, strong and bold cherishes them, and is formed a Whig by nature.”
“We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication .”
“Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.”
“Perseverance in object, though not by the most direct way, is often more laudable than perpetual changes, as often as the object shifts light.”
“A rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive.”
“You see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world, and procure them its praise.”
“Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.”
“No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap.”
“The Giver of life gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness.”
“It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers but by their distribution that good government is effected.”
“It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail.”
“The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government of the ingredient of republicanism...”
“The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it; but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.”
“A cold-blooded, calculation, unprincipled, usurper, without a virtue, no statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil government, and supplying ignorance by bold presumption.”
“The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.”
“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
“The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.”
“A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”
“The more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.”
“Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and their families selected for the trust.”
“Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take them.”
“With all the imperfections of our present government, it is without comparison the best existing, or that ever did exist.”
“I hold the precepts of Jesus as delivered by Himself, to be the most pure, benevolent and sublime which have ever been preached to man...”
“Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.”
“Would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.”
“Courts love the people always, as wolves do the sheep.”
“When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.”
“Taste cannot be controlled by law.”
“No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”
“The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”
“Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself.”
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