Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Quotes

• 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.