Quotes from Thomas Jefferson

People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education.

The only true corrective of Constitutional abuses is education.

I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.

For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.

When earth is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance and of the best quality.

We must use a good deal of economy in our wood, never cutting down new, where we can make the old do.

Equal rights for all, special privileges for none

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.

Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow.

Experience has proved to us that a dollar of silver disappears for every dollar of paper emitted.

The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience.

Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christians.

My passion strengthens daily to quit political turmoil, and retire into the bosom of my family, the only scene of sincere and purehappiness.

There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.

Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church ... made of Christendom a slaughter-house.

Any woodsman can tell you that in a broken and sundered nest, one can hardly find more than a precious few whole eggs. So it is with the family.

Our wish is that...[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

The evidence of the natural rights of expatriation, like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical