Top 500 Thomas Jefferson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Merchants have no country.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Featured in: Country Quotes

202. “Certain teachings in the Bible are as diamonds in a dung-heap.”

— Thomas Jefferson

203. “Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art. To give praise where it is not due, might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature.”

— Thomas Jefferson

204. “Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.”

— Thomas Jefferson

205. “All through your life, you’ll be faced with making a decision between two things-choose the one that is right. If they are both right, then choose the one that will make you feel the best about it at the end of the day.”

— Thomas Jefferson

206. “It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.”

— Thomas Jefferson

207. “A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.”

— Thomas Jefferson

208. “The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

— Thomas Jefferson

209. “Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights.”

— Thomas Jefferson

210. “I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word in only one way.”

— Thomas Jefferson

211. “To every obstacle oppose patience, perseverance and soothing language.”

— Thomas Jefferson

212. “Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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213. “The Christian god is a being of terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”

— Thomas Jefferson

214. “Power is not alluring to pure minds.”

— Thomas Jefferson

215. “The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.”

— Thomas Jefferson

216. “A pirate spreading misery and ruin over the face of the ocean.”

— Thomas Jefferson

217. “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”

— Thomas Jefferson

218. “When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil; while fretting and fuming only serves to increase your own torments.”

— Thomas Jefferson

219. “Nobody can acquire honor by doing what is wrong.”

— Thomas Jefferson

220. “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”

— Thomas Jefferson

221. “I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.”

— Thomas Jefferson

222. “Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”

— Thomas Jefferson

223. “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

— Thomas Jefferson

224. “The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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225. “Man is not made for the State but the State for man and it derives its just powers only from the consent of the governed.”

— Thomas Jefferson

226. “To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”

— Thomas Jefferson

227. “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.”

— Thomas Jefferson

228. “Money, not morality, constitutes the principle of commercial nations.”

— Thomas Jefferson

229. “The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.”

— Thomas Jefferson

230. “Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”

— Thomas Jefferson

231. “The colleges of Edinburgh and Geneva as seminaries of science, are considered as the two eyes of Europe. While Great Britain and America give the preference to the former, all other countries give it to the latter.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Featured in: Country Quotes

232. “Above all I hope that the education of the common people will be attended to so they won’t forget the basic principles of freedom.”

— Thomas Jefferson

233. “Beer, if drank with moderation, softens the temper, cheers the spirit, and promotes health.”

— Thomas Jefferson

234. “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

— Thomas Jefferson

235. “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

— Thomas Jefferson

236. “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

— Thomas Jefferson

237. “My heart trembles when I reflect that God is just.”

— Thomas Jefferson

238. “Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.”

— Thomas Jefferson

239. “Without virtue, happiness cannot be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

240. “An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.”

— Thomas Jefferson

241. “I extremely believe in luck, and I discovered more hard work, your luck as much.”

— Thomas Jefferson

242. “A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

244. “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.”

— Thomas Jefferson

245. “I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it’s laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”

— Thomas Jefferson

246. “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

247. “Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.”

— Thomas Jefferson

248. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.”

— Thomas Jefferson

249. “All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”

— Thomas Jefferson

250. “Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.”

— Thomas Jefferson