Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
— Thomas Jefferson
Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.
Delay is preferable to error.
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
One man with courage is a majority.
Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
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.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.
No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.
The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
I cannot live without books.
When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.
The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.
I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
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.
My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.
Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
