Quotes from Thomas Jefferson

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of '76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

[W]ell I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

The art of governing consists simply of being honest, exercising common sense, following principle, and doing what is right and just.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.