“The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches. We must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“A government which can be felt; a government of energy. God send that our country may never have a government, which it can feel.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“To the corruptions of christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Of all machines, the human heart is the most complicated and inexplicable.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
