Thomas Jefferson

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

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

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

The flames kindled on the Fourth 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.

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

The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.

The government is best which governs least.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

I know of 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 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.

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.

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

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

...a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which 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.

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.

If you are obliged to neglect any thing, let it be your chemistry. It is the least useful and the least amusing to a country gentleman of all the ordinary branches of science.

I have ever deemed it more honorable and more profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate - to surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance.

It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

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

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

I never believed there was one code of morality for a public and another for a private man.

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

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle.

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

It was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back.

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.