“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I may grow rich by an art I am compelled to follow; I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own judgment; but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve and abhor.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
―
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
“Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I am bold to Say that neither you nor I, will live to See the Course which 'the Wonders of the Times' will take. Many Years, and perhaps Centuries must pass, before the current will acquire a Settled direction... yet Platonic, Pythagoric, Hindoo, and cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.
―
Thomas Jefferson
“There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, "never to contradict anybody.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
