“Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”
―
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
“I am not a Federalist because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever....Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude
from achieving his goal.
Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong attitude.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrant. It is its natural manure.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
