Quotes from Thomas Jefferson

Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take them.

Do not neglect your music. It will be a companion which will sweeten many hours of life to you.

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.

What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.

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.

Take painsto write a neat round, plain hand, and you will find it a great convenience through life to write a small and compact hand as well as a fair and legible one.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

I haven't failed. I've just found 10, 000 ways that don't work.

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

I cannot live without books.

We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.

None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important.