Thomas Jefferson
The variety of opinions leads to questions. Questions lead to truth.Collection: Opinion
I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war.Collection: War
All the capital employed in paper speculation is barren and useless, producing, like that on a gaming table, no accession to itself, and is withdrawn from commerce and agriculture where it would have produced addition to the common mass It nourishes in our citizens habits of vice and idleness instead of industry and morality It has furnished effectual means of corrupting such a portion of the legislature as turns the balance between the honest voters whichever way it is directed.Collection: Mean
Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.Collection: Decision
What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.Collection: Men
When great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations to us, and Providence has in fact so established the order of things, as that most evils are the means of producing some good.Collection: Mean
I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the mockingbird. Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs.Collection: Children
The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Kings
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.Collection: Wisdom
We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.Collection: Self
I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.Collection: Country
No person shall be restrained of his liberty but by regular process from a court of justice, authorized by a general law. . . . On complaint of an unlawful imprisonment to any judge whatsoever, he shall have the prisoner immediately brought before him and shall discharge him if his imprisonment be unlawful. The officer in whose custody the prisoner is shall obey the order of the judge, and both judge and officer shall be responsible civilly and criminally for a failure of duty herein.Collection: Law
The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor I.Collection: Office
Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.Collection: Men
A lottery is a salutary instrument and a tax... laid on the willing only, that is to say, on those who can risk the price of a ticket without sensible injury, for the possibility of a higher prize.Collection: Gambling
Peace, that glorious moment in time when everyone stops and reloads.Collection: Moments
But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.Collection: Differences
The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of Heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Happiness
Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.Collection: Knowledge
I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living. . . . We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another. . . . The earth belongs always to the living generations.Collection: 4th Of July
To make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in Domestic ones gives the outline of the proper division of powers between the general [national] and particular [state] governments.Collection: 4th Of July
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.Collection: Beauty
I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial.Collection: Friendship
A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written.Collection: Daughter
No nation is drunken where wine is cheap.Collection: Drinking
To every obstacle oppose patience, perseverance and soothing language.Collection: Perseverance
Political interest [can] never be separated in the long run from moral right.Collection: Running
I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives. For it is in our lives, and not from our works, that our religion must be read.Collection: Spirituality
I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.Collection: Believe
[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.Collection: Government
The sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also.Collection: Ambition
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise.Collection: Exercise
the field of knolege is the common property of all mankindCollection: Educational
we defer therefore till this time twelve month to avail ourselves of the instruction of that place, and particularly of your kindness in the two branches of Botany and Natural history to which we wish him particularly to apply.Collection: Kindness
in the spring he will attend your botanical course. his natural turn is very strongly to the objects of your two courses of lectures, and I hope you will have reason to be contended with his capacity & character.Collection: Spring
the boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.Collection: Educational
I endeavor to keep their attention fixed on the main objects of all science, the freedom & happiness of man.Collection: Educational
no one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in it's effect towards supporting free & good government.Collection: Education
for the present we may groupe the sciences into Professorships as follows, subject however to be changed according to the qualifications of the persons we may be able to engage.Collection: Educational
Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reeactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free.Collection: Government
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.Collection: Religious
The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruption's of time and party, its members would become despots.Collection: Party
Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.Collection: Character
As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers.Collection: Abundance
Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.Collection: Ignorance
Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus.Collection: Jesus
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.Collection: Reading