“The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not an article for mere consumption, but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time, and that of 20 aids could effect. For while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented. I have thought it better to trust the justice of my country-men, that they would judge me by what they see of my conduct on the stage where they have placed me.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."
―
Thomas Jefferson
“When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. 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.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If you want something you've never had
You must be willing to do something you've never done.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“A habilidade mais valiosa é aquela de jamais usar duas palavras quando uma apenas basta.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“...as we advance in life these things fall off one by one , and I suspect we are left with only Homer and Virgil, perhaps with only Homer alone.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
