Thomas Jefferson
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Delay is preferable to error.
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.
An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
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?
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.
Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.
Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.
The world is indebted for all triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.
The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.
My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.
As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.
I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
I sincerely believe... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.
No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.
We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.
I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.
I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.
An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.
Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.
Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.
No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.