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Thomas Jefferson Quotations

Thomas Jefferson letter to Peter Carr
Categories: Virtue
Date: August 19, 1785
Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you... From the practice of the purest virtue, you may be assured you will derive the most sublime comforts in every moment of life, and in the moment of death.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Peter Carr
Categories: Advice
Date: August 19, 1785
It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good disposition.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Martha Jefferson
Categories: Advice
Date: May 5, 1787
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. And that you may be always doing good, my dear, is the ardent prayer of yours affectionately.

Thomas Jefferson A Summary View of the Rights of British America
Categories: Political Leaders
Date: 1775
It behooves you, therefore, to think and act for yourself and your people. The great principles of right and wrong are legible to every reader; to pursue them requires not the aid of many counselors. The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph Milligan
Categories: Protecting
Date: April 6, 1816
For example. If the system be established on basis of Income, and his just proportion on that scale has been already drawn from every one, to step into the field of Consumption, and tax special articles in that, as broadcloth or homespun, wine or whiskey, a coach or a wagon, is doubly taxing the same article. For that portion of Income with which these articles are purchased, having already paid its tax as Income, to pay another tax on the thing it purchased, is paying twice for the same thing; it is an aggrievance on the citizens who use these articles in exoneration of those who do not, contrary to the most sacred of the duties of a government, to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Peter Carr
Categories: Arms
Date: August 19, 1785
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.

Thomas Jefferson letter to George Washington
Categories: Arms
Date: June 19, 1796
One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Cartwright
Categories: Arms
Date: 1824
We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles . The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Trustees for the Lottery of East Tennessee College
Categories: Education
Date: May 6, 1810
No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its effect towards supporting free and good government.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Kercheval
Categories: Budget
Date: July 12, 1816
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Spencer Roane
Categories: Budget
Date: March 9, 1821
The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Jose Correa de Serra
Categories: Education
Date: November 25, 1817
To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Marquis de Lafayette
Categories: Budget
Date: November 4, 1823
[A] rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on Virginia Query 19
Categories: Character
Date: 1781
It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Commerce
Date: July 7, 1785
I think all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Pickney
Categories: Commerce
Date: May 29, 1797
War is not the best engine for us to resort to; nature has given us one in our commerce, which if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.

Thomas Jefferson letter to David Humphreys
Categories: Constitutional Convention
Date: March 18, 1789
The example of changing a constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had give them. The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberation, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Wilson Nicholas
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: September 7, 1803
Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.

Thomas Jefferson Draft Kentucky Resolutions
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: 1798
The construction applied...to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power...ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers, nor a part to be so taken as to destroy the whole residue of that instrument.

Thomas Jefferson Opinion on a National Bank
Categories: Congress Legislature
Date: February 15, 1791
It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please…. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It [the Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
[H]is was the singular destiny and merit, of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war, for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils through the birth of a government, new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quite and orderly train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the history of the world furnishes no other example.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Albert Gallatin
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: May 20, 1808
[T]he true key for the construction of everything doubtful in a law is the intention of the law-makers. This is most safely gathered from the words, but may be sought also in extraneous circumstances provided they do not contradict the express words of the law.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Johnson
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: June 12, 1823
On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Adams Wells
Categories: Declaration of Independence
Date: May 12, 1821
The Declaration of Independence... [is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Henry Lee
Categories: Declaration of Independence
Date: May 8, 1825
This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: November 28, 1820
The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Colonel Charles Yancey
Categories: Education
Date: January 6, 1816
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 on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect and noble.

Thomas Jefferson letter to George Washington
Categories: Equality
Date: April 16, 1784
The foundation on which all [constitutions] are built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every preeminence but that annexed to legal office, and particularly the denial of a preeminence by birth.

Thomas Jefferson Autobiography
Categories: Federal Government
Date: 1821
Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Charles Hammond
Categories: Federal Government
Date: August 18, 1821
[W]hen all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Judge William Johnson
Categories: Federalism
Date: June 12, 1823
[T]he States can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore...never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market.

Thomas Jefferson on Patrick Henry
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: December, 1824
His temper was excellent, and he generally observed decorum in debate. On one or two occasions I have seen him angry, and his anger was terrible; those who witnessed it, were not disposed to rouse it again.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18
Categories: God
Date: 1781
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph Milligan
Categories: Taxation
Date: April 6, 1816
For example. If the system be established on basis of Income, and his just proportion on that scale has been already drawn from every one, to step into the field of Consumption, and tax special articles in that, as broadcloth or homespun, wine or whiskey, a coach or a wagon, is doubly taxing the same article. For that portion of Income with which these articles are purchased, having already paid its tax as Income, to pay another taz on the thing it purchased, is paying twice for the same thing; it is an aggrievance on the citizens who use these articles in exoneration of those who do not, contrary to the most sacred of the duties of a government, to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Ludlow
Categories: Bureaucracy
Date: September 6, 1824
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

Thomas Jefferson letter to E. Carrington
Categories: Government
Date: May 27, 1788
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Government
Date: March 4, 1801
Still one thing more, fellow citizens—a wise and frugal government...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. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities
Thomas Jefferson letter to Abigail Adams
Categories: Government
Date: February 22, 1787
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

Thomas Jefferson letter to The Republican Citizens of Washington County, Maryland
Categories: Government
Date: March 31, 1809
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14
Categories: History
Date: 1781
History by apprising [citizens] of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Hugh White
Categories: Immigration
Date: May 2, 1801
Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules. That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit, will certainly be the aim of our legislatures, general and particular.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Charles Hammond
Categories: Judiciary
Date: August 18, 1821
It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression...that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary;...working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Judge Spencer Roane
Categories: Judiciary
Date: September 6, 1819
The Constitution...is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Livingston
Categories: Judiciary
Date: March 25, 1825
One single object...[will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Ritchie
Categories: Judiciary
Date: December 25, 1820
A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Ritchie
Categories: Judiciary
Date: December 25, 1820
The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone.

Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Justice
Date: March 4, 1801
[I]t is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government.... Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever persuasion, religious or political....

Thomas Jefferson Note in Destutt de Tracy
Categories: Justice
Date: 1816
The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all citizens.

Thomas Jefferson Opinion on Debts Due to Soldiers
Categories: Justice
Date: 1790
It is not honorable to take mere legal advantage, when it happens to be contrary to justice.

Thomas Jefferson evening July 3; Jefferson died the next morning
Categories: Last Words
Date: July 4, 1826
Is it the Fourth?
Thomas Jefferson letter to William Johnson
Categories: Law
Date: June 12, 1823
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Liberty
Date: September 12, 1821
I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Declaration of Independence
Date: September 12, 1821
[T]he flames kindled on the 4 of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

Thomas Jefferson Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking up Arms
Categories: Liberty
Date: July 6, 1775
Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them.

Thomas Jefferson Summary View of the Rights of British America
Categories: Liberty
Date: August, 1774
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Stephens Smith
Categories: Liberty
Date: November 13, 1787
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson letter to James Monroe
Categories: National Defense
Date: October 24, 1823
Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace.

Thomas Jefferson Second Inaugural Address
Categories: International Relations
Date: March 4, 1805
We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties, and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is trusted on its word when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Elbridge Gerry
Categories: International Relations
Date: May 13, 1797
I have been happy... in believing that... whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never give up our Union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators.

Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Opinion
Date: March 4, 1801
[L]et them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Thomas Jefferson letter to M. Correa
Categories: Opinion
Date: December 27, 1814
The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith
Categories: Patriotism
Date: February 21, 1825
Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Charles Jarvis
Categories: The People
Date: September 28, 1820
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 letter to Richard M. Johnson
Categories: Political Leaders
Date: March 10, 1808
I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Caeser Rodney
Categories: The Presidency
Date: February 10, 1810
In times of peace the people look most to their representatives; but in war, to the executive solely.
Thomas Jefferson Westmoreland County Petition
Categories: Religion and Morality
Date: November 2, 1785
Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts...in which all religions agree.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect and noble.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Miller
Categories: Religious Liberty
Date: January 23, 1808
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.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17
Categories: Religious Liberty
Date: 1782
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Francis C. Gray
Categories: Republican Government
Date: March 4, 1815
[A]lthough a republican government is slow to move, yet when once in motion, its momentum becomes irresistible.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Roger C. Weightman
Categories: Rights
Date: June 24, 1826
All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride legitimately, by the grace of God.

Thomas Jefferson Rights of British America
Categories: Rights
Date: 1774
A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to James Monroe
Categories: Rights
Date: 1791
Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to John Cartwright
Categories: Rights
Date: June 5, 1824
Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Rights
Date: March 4, 1801
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.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Abigail Adams
Categories: Judiciary
Date: September 11, 1804
[T]he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their, own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Judge William Johnson
Categories: Separation of Powers
Date: June 12, 1823
[T]o preserve the republican form and principles of our Constitution and cleave to the salutary distribution of powers which that [the Constitution] has established...are the two sheet anchors of our Union. If driven from either, we shall be in danger of foundering.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Coles
Categories: Slavery
Date: August 25, 1814
The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.

Thomas Jefferson Autobiography
Categories: Slavery
Date: 1821
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

Thomas Jefferson deleted portion of a draft of the Declaration of Independence
Categories: Slavery
Date: June, 1776
He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Wayles Eppes
Categories: Taxation
Date: June 24, 1813
Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reeactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph Milligan
Categories: Taxation
Date: April 6, 1816
To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

Thomas Jefferson Autobiography
Categories: Congress Legislature
Date: 1821
If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour? That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17
Categories: Truth
Date: 1781
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors?

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Coles
Categories: Tyranny
Date: August 25, 1814
I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast...would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Benjamin Rush
Categories: Tyranny
Date: September 23, 1800
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17
Categories: Virtue
Date: 1781
Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen, people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Thomas Jefferson letter to James Madison
Categories: Separation of Powers
Date: January, 1797
The principle of the Constitution is that of a separation of legislative, Executive and Judiciary functions, except in cases specified. If this principle be not expressed in direct terms, it is clearly the spirit of the Constitution, and it ought to be so commented and acted on by every friend of free government.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Michael Megear
Categories: Poverty
Date: May 29, 1823
It is a duty certainly to give our sparings to those who want; but to see also that they are faithfully distributed, and duly apportioned to the respective wants of those receivers. And why give through agents whom we know not, to persons whom we know not, and in countries from which we get no account, where we can do it at short hand, to objects under our eye, through agents we know, and to supply wants we see?

Thomas Jefferson letter to Jean Nicolas Démeunier
Categories: Work
Date: April 29, 1795
In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable. I am myself a nail-maker.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith
Categories: Advice
Date: February 21, 1825
This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which might possibly have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run; and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course. Few words will be necessary, with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Miller
Categories: Religious Liberty
Date: January 23, 1809
I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.

Thomas Jefferson letter to a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, Connecticut
Categories: Religious Liberty
Date: January 1, 1802
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Government
Date: October 28, 1813
The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most - for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Government
Date: October 28, 1813
For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Taylor
Categories: Republican Government
Date: May 28, 1816
If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko
Categories: Government
Date: 1810
The freedom and happiness of man...[are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Francis C. Gray
Categories: Republican Government
Date: 1815
Although a republican government is slow to move, yet when once in motion, its momentum becomes irresistible.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Government
Date: 1796
This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on Virginia, Query 12
Categories: Congress Legislature
Date: 1782
On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already?

Thomas Jefferson letter to George Logan
Categories: Politics and Parties
Date: 1805
The duty of an upright administration is to pursue its course steadily, to know nothing of these family dissentions, and to cherish the good principles of both parties.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Dickinson
Categories: Politics and Parties
Date: 1801
The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas McKean
Categories: Politics and Parties
Date: 1801
To restore... harmony,... to render us again one people acting as one nation should be the object of every man really a patriot.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Duane
Categories: Politics and Parties
Date: 1811
If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Political Leaders
Date: December 21, 1817
Men of energy of character must have enemies; because there are two sides to every question, and taking one with decision, and acting on it with effect, those who take the other will of course be hostile in proportion as they feel that effect.

Thomas Jefferson Second Inaugural Address
Categories: The Press
Date: December 9, 1805
During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.

Thomas Jefferson Second Inaugural Address
Categories: Opinion
Date: 1805
When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Richard M. Johnson
Categories: Political Leaders
Date: 1808
It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Abigail Adams
Categories: Political Leaders
Date: 1804
With those who wish to think amiss of me, I have learned to be perfectly indifferent; but where I know a mind to be ingenuous, and to need only truth to set it to rights, I cannot be passive.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Richard M. Johnson
Categories: Virtue
Date: 1808
I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles.

Thomas Jefferson Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia
Categories: Education
Date: August 4, 1818
To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment; And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14
Categories: The People
Date: 1781
But of all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Carrington
Categories: Education
Date: January 16, 1787
Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Wayles Eppes
Categories: Budget
Date: June 24, 1813
It is a wise rule and should be fundamental in a government disposed to cherish its credit, and at the same time to restrain the use of it within the limits of its faculties, "never to borrow a dollar without laying a tax in the same instant for paying the interest annually, and the principal within a given term; and to consider that tax as pledged to the creditors on the public faith."

Thomas Jefferson letter to James Madison
Categories: Budget
Date: September 6, 1789
But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.

Thomas Jefferson Draft Constitution for the State of Virginia
Categories: Arms
Date: June, 1776
No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands].

Thomas Jefferson Rights of British America
Categories: Taxation
Date: 1774
Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.

Thomas Jefferson letter to James Madison
Categories: Taxation
Date: 1784
Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.

Thomas Jefferson letter to James Madison
Categories: Taxation
Date: 1784
Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Gouverneur Morris
Categories: Taxation
Date: 1793
It must be observed that our revenues are raised almost wholly on imported goods.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Taylor
Categories: Taxation
Date: 1798
Excessive taxation...will carry reason and reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Lafayette
Categories: Taxation
Date: 1823
A rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Henri Gregoire
Categories: Slavery
Date: February 25, 1809
[B]ut whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re- establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18
Categories: Slavery
Date: 1781
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. 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; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him.
Thomas Jefferson Answers to de Meusnier Questions
Categories: The People
Date: 1786
In America, no other distinction between man and man had ever been known but that of persons in office exercising powers by authority of the laws, and private individuals. Among these last, the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Adams Wells
Categories: Rights
Date: 1819
The Declaration of Independence...[is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Wilson Nicholas
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: 1803
Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Johnson
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: 1823
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Mesrs. Eddy, Russel, Thurber, Wheaton and Smith
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: March 27, 1801
The Constitution on which our Union rests, shall be administered by me [as President] according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption - a meaning to be found in the explanations of those who advocated, not those who opposed it, and who opposed it merely lest the construction should be applied which they denounced as possible.

Thomas Jefferson Opinion on National Bank
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: 1791
They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please...Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Adams Wells
Categories: Separation of Powers
Date: May 12, 1819
My construction of the constitution is very different from that you quote. It is that each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Maria Cosway
Categories: Government
Date: 1786
If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours
Categories: The People
Date: 1813
[The people] are in truth the only legitimate proprietors of the soil and government.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Cartwright
Categories: The People
Date: 1824
The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves in all cases to which they think themselves competent, or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Johnson
Categories: The People
Date: 1823
The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Richard Rush
Categories: Liberty
Date: October 20, 1820
The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Thomas Jefferson letter to William Stephens Smith
Categories: Liberty
Date: 1787
What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Rutledge
Categories: Virtue
Date: 1788
My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Sinclair
Categories: Advice
Date: 1791
It is a happy circumstance in human affairs that evils which are not cured in one way will cure themselves in some other.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Elbridge Gerry
Categories: America
Date: March 29, 1801
The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to William Branch Giles
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: December 31, 1795
[T]he President, who errs as other men do, but errs with integrity.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
Although in the circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words. In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short and embarrassed.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance.

Thomas Jefferson Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank
Categories: Federalism
Date: February 15, 1791
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: January 2, 1814
His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder

Thomas Jefferson Notes on Virginia, Query 19
Categories: Poverty
Date: 1781
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Republican Government
Date: March 4, 1801
Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Thomas Jefferson Rights of British America
Categories: Laws of Nature
Date: 1774
That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Taylor
Categories: Taxation
Date: November 26, 1798
Excessive taxation … will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph C. Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: January 22, 1820
All the States but our own are sensible that knowlege is power.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Dupont de Nemours
Categories: Education
Date: April 24, 1816
Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Taylor
Categories: Budget
Date: May 28, 1816
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 on Alexander Hamilton in The Anas
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: Unknown
Hamilton was indeed a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched & perverted by the British example, as to be under thoro' conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: History
Date: September 8, 1817
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV
Categories: The People
Date: 1781
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.

Thomas Jefferson Opinion on a National Bank
Categories: Constitutional Interpretation
Date: February 15, 1791
It is an established rule of construction, where a phrase will bear either of two meanings to give it that which will allow some meaning to the other parts of the instrument, and not that which will render all the others useless. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given to them. It was intended to lace them up straitly with in the enumerated powers, and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Joel Barlow
Categories: Education
Date: December 10, 1807
People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Carrington
Categories: Education
Date: January 16, 1787
Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.

Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: International Relations
Date: March 4, 1801
Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to William Hunter
Categories: Republican Government
Date: March 11, 1790
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

Thomas Jefferson fair copy of the drafts of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798
Categories: Constitution
Date: 1798
In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Cooper
Categories: Bureaucracy
Date: November 29, 1802
If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Shelton Gilliam
Categories: Budget
Date: June 19, 1808
The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys.

Thomas Jefferson commenting on judges' apparel
Categories: Judiciary
Date: Unknown
Jefferson was against any needless official apparel, but if the gown was to carry, he said: "For Heaven's sake discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Monsieur A. Coray
Categories: Judiciary
Date: October 31, 1823
At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Charles Hammond
Categories: Judiciary
Date: August 18, 1821
The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Judge Spencer Roane
Categories: Judiciary
Date: March 9, 1821
The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Archibald Stewart
Categories: Liberty
Date: December 23, 1791
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Elbridge Gerry
Categories: The Presidency
Date: May 13, 1797
The second office of this government is honorable & easy, the first is but a splendid misery.

Thomas Jefferson Jefferson, on Jefferson, in
Categories: Founders on Founders
Date: 1800
I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.

Thomas Jefferson Jefferson to Bancroft
Categories: Property
Date: January 26, 1788
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.

Thomas Jefferson letter to John Holmes
Categories: Slavery
Date: April 22, 1820
We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the state of Virginia
Categories: Law
Date: 1782
We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Mary Jefferson Eppes
Categories: Marriage
Date: January 7, 1798
Harmony in the married state is the very first object to be aimed at.
Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Opinion
Date: March 4, 1801
Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle.
Thomas Jefferson letter to John Randolph
Categories: Opinion
Date: December 1, 1803
Experience having long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish.
Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams
Categories: Political Leaders
Date: December 28, 1796
I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep & a warmer berth below it encircled, with the society of neighbors, friends & fellow laborers of the earth rather than with spies & sycophants...I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office.
Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia
Categories: Commerce
Date: 1787
It should be our endeavor to cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation.... Our interest will be to throw open the doors of commerce, and to knock off all its shackles, giving perfect freedom to all persons for the vent to whatever they may choose to bring into our ports, and asking the same in theirs.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Amos Marsh
Categories: Constitution
Date: November 20, 1801
I join cordially in admiring and revering the Constitution of the United States, the result of the collected wisdom of our country. That wisdom has committed to us the important task of proving by example that a government, if organized in all its parts on the Representative principle unadulterated by the infusion of spurious elements, if founded, not in the fears & follies of man, but on his reason, on his sense of right, on the predominance of the social over his dissocial passions, may be so free as to restrain him in no moral right, and so firm as to protect him from every moral wrong.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Francis Willis Jr.
Categories: Family
Date: April 18, 1790
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family.
Thomas Jefferson letter to John Melish
Categories: Political Leaders
Date: January 13, 1813
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens....There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends & books.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Hugh P. Taylor
Categories: History
Date: October 4, 1823
It is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.
Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Politics and Parties
Date: March 4, 1801
During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good....Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.
Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX,
Categories: Poverty
Date: 1787
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Charles Yancey
Categories: The Press
Date: January 6, 1816
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko
Categories: The Press
Date: April 2, 1802
Newspapers...serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.
Thomas Jefferson letter to George Washington
Categories: The Press
Date: September 9, 1792
No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will.
Thomas Jefferson letter to David Harding
Categories: Public Speaking
Date: April 20, 1824
I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as preeminent specimens of logic, taste and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.
Thomas Jefferson letter to James Smith
Categories: Truth
Date: December 8, 1822
Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the spot of every wind. With such persons, gullability, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck.
Thomas Jefferson Letter to James Madison
Categories: Law
Date: December 20, 1787
The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelve-month between the ingross-ing a bill & passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word: and that if circum-stances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson
Categories: Collectivism, Government, Judiciary
Date: Unknown
The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to James Bowdoin
Categories: National Defense, War
Date: 1806
Although our prospect is peace, our policy and purpose are to provide for defense by all those means to which our resources are competent.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Noah Worcester
Categories: Education, Human Nature, War
Date: 1817
I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to George Washington
Categories: National Defense, War
Date: 1788
The power of making war often prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of peace.
Thomas Jefferson
Categories: Economy, Power, Public Debt
Date: Unknown
I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
Thomas Jefferson
Categories: Public Debt, Virtue
Date: Unknown
I, however, place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kerchival
Categories: Public Debt, Taxation, Tyranny
Date: Unknown
The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington
Categories: Education, Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1787
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey
Categories: Education, Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1816
The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to John Jay
Categories: Liberty, Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1786
Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler
Categories: Freedom of Speech/Press, Newspapers, Truth
Date: 1804
No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart
Categories: Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1799
Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet
Categories: Freedom of Speech/Press, Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1803
It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe
Categories: Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1816
From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell
Categories: Newspapers, Press, The Press, Truth
Date: 1807
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Barnabas Bidwell
Categories: Newspapers, Press, The Press, Truth
Date: 1806
As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers.
Thomas Jefferson
Categories: Liberty, Newspapers, Press, The Press, Truth
Date: Unknown
But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe
Categories: Newspapers, Press, The Press, Truth
Date: 1815
A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one.
Thomas Jefferson
Categories: Education, Power
Date: 1820
I know no safe depositary 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 Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey
Categories: Education
Date: 1816
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 Thomas Jefferson to Littleton Waller Tazewell
Categories: Education, Liberty
Date: 1805
Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell
Categories: Education, Republican Government
Date: 1814
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.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: 1818
A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.
Thomas Jefferson Letter CLXIV to William Berry
Categories: American Revolution
Date: July 2, 1822
Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.
Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia
Categories: Separation of Powers
Date: Unknown
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
Thomas Jefferson
Categories: National Defense
Date: Unknown
[T]he essential principles of government (are)... Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none
Thomas Jefferson Letter to James Madison
Categories: Government, Truth
Date: February 17, 1926
It has also been a great solace to me, to believe that you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued for preserving to them, in all their purity, the blessings of self-government, which we had assisted too in acquiring for them. If ever the earth has beheld a system of administration conducted with a single and steadfast eye to the general interest and happiness of those committed to it, one which, protected by truth, can never know reproach, it is that to which our lives have been devoted.
Thomas Jefferson Letter to Peter Carr
Categories: Virtue
Date: August 19, 1785
Whenever you are to do a thing tho’ it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.
Thomas Jefferson Letter to William C. Jarvis
Categories: Constitution, Judiciary
Date: 1820
[T]o consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions... would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
Thomas Jefferson Letter to Mrs. John Adams
Categories: Despotism, Judiciary, Separation of Powers
Date: September, 1804
[N]othing in the Constitution has given [the judiciary] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the executive to decide for them. Both magistracies are equally independent in the sphere of action assigned to them. The judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment; because that power was placed in their hands by the Constitution. But the Executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, was bound to remit the execution of it; because that power has been confided to him by the Constitution. That instrumentmeant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what are not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature & Executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch
Thomas Jefferson Letter to Henry Lee
Categories: Declaration of Independence
Date: May 8, 1825
This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c
Thomas Jefferson The Kentucky Resolutions
Categories: Bureaucracy, Despotism, Power, The People, Tyranny
Date: 1799
free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power
Thomas Jefferson A Summary View of the Rights of British America 1774.
Categories: Slavery
Date: Unknown
The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state
Thomas Jefferson Draft of the Declaration of Independence
Categories: Slavery
Date: 1776
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This practical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce
Thomas Jefferson The Declaration of Independence The Declaration of Independence
Categories: Right of Revolution
Date: July 4, 1776
Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Thomas Jefferson The Declaration of Independence
Categories: Declaration of Independence, International Relations
Date: July 4, 1776
Enemies in War, in Peace Friends
Thomas Jefferson Second Inaugural Address
Categories: Property, Rights
Date: March 4, 1805
[T]hat the public efforts may be directed honestly to the public good, that…law and order [be] preserved, equality of rights maintained, and that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his father’s
Thomas Jefferson Letter to James Madison Division of Property
Categories: Government Spending, Property
Date: 1785
Legislators invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind
Thomas Jefferson To Spencer Roane
Categories: Religion and Morality
Date: 1819
Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.
Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
Categories: Religion and Morality
Date: April 4, 1801
[B]enign religion, professed, in deed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring and overruling Providence, which, by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter
Thomas Jefferson Letter to John Adams
Categories: Constitutional Convention
Date: 1787
[The Federal Convention] is really an assembly of demigods
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
Categories: Federal Government
Date: November 18, 1788
With respect to the Federalist… as being, in my opinion, the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written
Thomas Jefferson Autobiography
Categories: Federalism
Date: Unknown
[I]t is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this great country already divided into states, that division must be made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by its individual proprietor... It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all
Thomas Jefferson Letter to Joseph Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: 1820
Knowledge is power
Thomas Jefferson [Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, et al.,] Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia,
Categories: Education
Date: August 4, 1818
[T]o instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens…this brings us to the point at which are to commence the higher branches of education...To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order
Thomas Jefferson . [Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, et al.,] Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia
Categories: Education, Public Service
Date: August 4, 1818
The objects of this primary education … would be…to form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend
Thomas Jefferson Report as Commissioners for the University of Virginia
Categories: Declaration of Independence, Founders on Founders, Liberty, Rights
Date: Unknown
as to the general principles of liberty and the rights of man in nature and in society, the doctrines of Locke, in his ‘Essay concerning the true original extent and end of civil government’, and of Sidney in his ‘Discourses on government’, may be considered as those generally approved by our fellow-citizens of this, and the US. And that on the distinctive principles of the government of our state, and of that of the United States, the best guides are to be found in 1. the Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental act of union of these states. 2. the book known by the title of ‘The Federalist’, being an authority to which appeal is habitually made by all, and rarely declined or denied by any evidence of the general opinion of those who framed, and of those who accepted the Constitution of the US. On questions as to it’s genuine meaning. 3. the Resolutions of the General assembly of Virginia in 1799 on the subject of the Alien and Sedition laws, which appeared to accord with the predominant sense of the people of the United States. 4. the Valedictory address of President Washington, as conveying political lessons of peculiar value
Thomas Jefferson Diffusion of Knowledge.
Categories: Education, Political Leaders
Date: 1779
[Students of] reading, writing and common arithmetick…Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history…should be rendered…worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens
Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia
Categories: Immigration
Date: 1782
[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty
Thomas Jefferson About Manufactures
Categories: Virtue
Date: 1782
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition
Thomas Jefferson Autobiography
Categories: Republican Government
Date: 1821
I considered 4 of these bills [of the revised code of Virginia] as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.
Thomas Jefferson Report as Commissioners for the University of Virginia with James Madison
Categories: Education
Date: March 4, 1895
[I]t is (our) duty … to pay especial attention to the principles of government which shall be inculcated therein (at the University), and to provide that none shall be inculcated which are incompatible with those on which the Constitutions of this State, and of the United States were genuinely based, in the common opinion; and for this purpose it may be necessary to point out specially where these principles are to be found legitimately developed