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I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

Thomas Jefferson

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Thomas Jefferson
Age: 83 †
Born: 1743
Born: April 2
Died: 1826
Died: July 4
3Rd U.S. President
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More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.
Thomas Jefferson
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The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson
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What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?
Thomas Jefferson
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Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
Thomas Jefferson
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Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself.
Thomas Jefferson
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We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest.
Thomas Jefferson
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God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.
Thomas Jefferson
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Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.
Thomas Jefferson
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The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
Thomas Jefferson
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By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline.
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The Bible is the cornerstone of liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
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What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.
Thomas Jefferson
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The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government
Thomas Jefferson
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If I had to choose between government and a free press, I would choose a free press.
Thomas Jefferson
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It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also.
Thomas Jefferson
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The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
Thomas Jefferson
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If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, that this would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it.
Thomas Jefferson
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The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?
Thomas Jefferson
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We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.
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Christian creeds and doctrines, the clergy's own fatal inventions, through all the ages has made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and divided it into sects of inextinguishable hatred for one another.
Thomas Jefferson