Quotes from Thomas Jefferson

The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

I have great confidence in the common sense of mankind in general.

No man has greater confidence than I have in the spirit of the people, to a rational extent. Whatever they can, they will.

Men possessing minds of the first order and who have had opportunities of being known and of acquiring the general confidence do not abound in any country beyond the wants of the country.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

If thinking men would have the courage to think for themselves, and to speak what they think, it would be found they do not differ in religious opinions as much as is supposed.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature.

The people are not always well-informed, but is better that they have misconceptions that make them restless than that they be lethargic-for lethargy in the people means death for republics.

In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.

Planting is one of my great amusements, and even of those things which can only be for posterity, for a Septuagenary has no right to count on any thing but annuals.

All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.

The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.

Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

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

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.