Best Thomas Jefferson Quotes
Thomas Jefferson Quotes About Freedom, Tyranny, Government, Liberty, Democracy, Religion, Education, The Constitution, Law, Truth, Love & Work! Thomas Jefferson emerged as an American politician, diplomat, lawyer, architect, and truth-seeker as the 3rd president of the United States of America from 1801 to 1809. On April 13, 1743, he was born. Before then, he had served as Vice President under John Adams and as Secretary of State under George Washington in the United States. President Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence, supported democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, inspiring American colonists to break away from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new state; he generated formative documents and decisions at both the national and international levels.
Jefferson and John Adams became close friends while sitting in the Continental Congress and working on the Declaration of Independence together. However, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican identity would make Adams, a Federalist, Jefferson’s political adversary. ‘Because he finished second in the presidential race of 1796, Jefferson was mistakenly chosen as Adams’ running mate under the -current electoral method.
As a classically trained architect, he worked in the tradition. His passion for religion and philosophy led him to serve as the first director and president of the American Philosophical Society, a non-denominational religious group that he rejected but was inspired by Christianity, Epicureanism, and deism.
Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) was considered one of the most significant American publications produced before 1800, is one of his works. Jefferson was a fervent advocate of the Enlightenment’s principles, beliefs, and teachings. Jefferson established the University of Virginia when he stepped down from public service. Jefferson was died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American Independence.
Best Thomas Jefferson Quotes
1. “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” – Thomas Jefferson
2. “Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” – Thomas Jefferson
3. “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” – Thomas Jefferson
4. “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” – Thomas Jefferson
5. “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” – Thomas Jefferson
6. “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” – Thomas Jefferson
7. “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson
8. “Never spend your money before you have earned it.” – Thomas Jefferson
9. “The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that… it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.” – Thomas Jefferson
10. “The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.” – Thomas Jefferson
11. “When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.” – Thomas Jefferson
12. “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” – Thomas Jefferson
13. “For people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.” – Thomas Jefferson
14. “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” – Thomas Jefferson
15. “I cannot live without books.” – Thomas Jefferson
16. “I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” – Thomas Jefferson
17. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” – Thomas Jefferson
18. “I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” – Thomas Jefferson
19. “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” – Thomas Jefferson
20. “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” – Thomas Jefferson
21. “On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.” – Thomas Jefferson
22. “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. – Thomas Jefferson
23. “Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.” – Thomas Jefferson
24. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” – Thomas Jefferson
25. “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” – Thomas Jefferson
26. “When we see religion split into so many thousand of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself. – Thomas Jefferson
27. “Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, &c. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.” – Thomas Jefferson
28. “As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. – Thomas Jefferson
29. “All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.” – Thomas Jefferson
30. “It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.” – Thomas Jefferson
