Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

405. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

408. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

418. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

426. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

428. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

444. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Thomas Jefferson