“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150. lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour? That 150. lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected. But to return again to our subject.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing was or is farther from my intentions, than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed doubt.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”
―
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 policy of the American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
