“It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it."
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Thomas Jefferson
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment”
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Thomas Jefferson
“History, by apprising [the people] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.
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Thomas Jefferson
“not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . 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.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. For not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. And were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“he repudiated the writings of the Apostle Paul," whom he considered the (first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.”
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Thomas Jefferson
