President Quotes

“So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.”

“If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”

“No other depositories of power [but the people themselves] have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge.”

“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”

“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.”

“A government held together by the bands of reason only, requires much compromise of opinion.”

“Although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.”

“It is better to have no ideas than false ones.”

“Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.”

“A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”

“You see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts.”

“I served with General Washington in die Legislature of Virginia...and...with Doctor Franklin in Congress. I never heard neither of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.”

“[I]n Great-Britain it is said that their constitution relies on the house of commons for honesty, and the lords for wisdom; whichwould be a rational reliance if honesty were to be bought with money, and if wisdom were hereditary.”

“Take more pleasure in giving what is best to another than in having it for yourself, and then all the world will love you.”

“We must use a good deal of economy in our wood, never cutting down new, where we can make the old do.”

“No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap.”

“We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.”

“I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”

“The dead should not rule the living”

“The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”

“It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations i.e., emancipation of slaves and settlement of the Virginia constitution on a firmer and more permanent basis.”

“Those who wish to be ignorant and free, believe in something that never was and never shall be.”

“The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.”

“The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.”

“The Earth is given as a common for men to labor and live in.”