Thomas Jefferson Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“[T]he people seem to have deposited the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new suit of clothes.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can always be pretended.”

“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.”

“Most men die at age 25, but aren't buried until 70.”

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them.”

“What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”