Quotes from Thomas Jefferson

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.

Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

The Declaration of Independence . . . [is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man.

God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.

Every honest man will suppose honest acts to flow from honest principles, and the rogues may rail without intermission.

The moral sense, or conscience, is as much part of a man as his leg or arm. It is given to all in a stronger or weaker degree.. It may be strengthened by exercise.

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in-as-much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors.

Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.

The uniform tenor of a man's life furnishes better evidence of what he has said or done on any particular occasion than the word of any enemy.

History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.

An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental.

The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.

Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.

A man's moral sense must be unusually strong if slavery does not make him a thief.

No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence.

Paper money is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied.