Quotes from Thomas Jefferson

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

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.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

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.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

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.

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of '76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccesful rebellions indeed generally establish the incroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medecine necessary for the sound health of government.

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.

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding... { Letter to John Adams , April 11, 1823 }

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.