Thomas Jefferson
Money, not morality, constitutes the principle of commercial nations.Collection: Principles
The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.Collection: Freedom
On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.Collection: Religious
All we can do is to make the best of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way what is bad.Collection: Love
Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.Collection: Time
The uniform tenor of a man's life furnishes better evidence of what he has said or done on any particular occasion than the word of any enemy.Collection: Men
History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.Collection: Men
What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.Collection: Hunting
The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep he waters pure.Collection: Water
I'd rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers.Collection: Government
I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.Collection: Fall
That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.Collection: Independent
The moral sense, or conscience, is as much part of a man as his leg or arm. It is given to all in a stronger or weaker degree.. It may be strengthened by exercise.Collection: Educational
The evils which of necessity encompass the life of man are sufficiently numerous. Why should we add to them by voluntarily distressing and destroying one another? Peace, brothers, is better than war. In a long and bloody war, we lose many friends, and gain nothing. Let us then live in peace and friendship together, doing to each other all the good we can.Collection: Peace
We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.Collection: Life
And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.Collection: God
The eyes of our citizens are not sufficiently open to the true cause of our distress. They ascribe them to everything but their true cause, the banking systemCollection: Eye
The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood.Collection: War
Our liberty depends on freedom of the press.Collection: Liberty
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.Collection: People
When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law.Collection: Ambition
The foundation on which (our government is) built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every pre-eminence but that annexed to legal office, and particularly the denial of a pre-eminence by birth.Collection: Men
There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe: the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.Collection: Education
When two parties make a compact, there results to each a power of compelling the other to execute it.Collection: Party
I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be fearedCollection: Philosophy
The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters.Collection: Friendship
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. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.Collection: Country
I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word in only one way.Collection: Way
He who is permitted by law to have no property of his own, can with difficulty conceive that property is founded in anything but force.Collection: Law
We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest.Collection: Government
There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.Collection: Religious
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.Collection: Government
Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.Collection: Sports
I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the States the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in any religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the States.Collection: Religious
If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. This will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reform and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is inevitable.Collection: Country
No society can make a perpetual constitution... The earth belongs always to the living generation.Collection: Animal
I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.Collection: Art
Men fight for freedom; then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.Collection: Freedom
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.Collection: Wisdom
Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth; and I am sure...we both value too much the freedom of opinion sanctioned by our Constitution, not to cherish its exercise even where in opposition to ourselves.Collection: Exercise
Our tenet ever was . . . that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action.Collection: Exercise
Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. The small landowners are the most precious part of a stateCollection: Country
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.Collection: Men
Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself.Collection: Country
Coffee - the favorite drink of the civilized world.Collection: Coffee
The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.Collection: Country
I have ever deemed it more honorable and more profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.Collection: Example
At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams.Collection: Dream
Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment.Collection: Motivational