“How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A machine for making revolutions is doing precisely the wrong thing at just the right time.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir. [Replying on his way to church one Sunday to a friend, who said to him “You going to church Mr. J. You do not believe a word in it.”]”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Of all machines, the human heart is the most complicated and inexplicable.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“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 them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollection of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“When we see religion split into so many thousand of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself.
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Thomas Jefferson
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”
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Thomas Jefferson
