“If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, that the dart belongs in usufruct to the living.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter, but we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this, the most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (April 11, 1823)”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden...But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“As Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “In matters of fashion, swim with the current. In matters of conscience, stand like a rock.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“That one generation of men in civil society have no right to make acts to bind another, is a truth that cannot be confused.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“القوة القانونية للحكومة يجب ان تتوقف على كبح الأفعال المؤذية للمواطنين تجاه الاخرين فقط . لا يوجد أذى لجارى ان قلت هناك أله واحد ، او هناك عشرين أله . هذا الفعل ليس سرقة لمحفظته او كسر لقدمه”
―
Thomas Jefferson