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I feel... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.

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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President Jefferson
T. Jefferson
Feel
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Even
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Length
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More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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Defend our liberties and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindred and tongues.
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Laws abridging the natural right of the citizen should be restrained by rigorous constructions within their narrowest limits.
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Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.
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The constitutional freedom of religion is the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights
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In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.
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I deny the power of the general government to making paper money, or anything else a legal tender.
Thomas Jefferson
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During the late war I had an infallible rule for deciding what Great Britain would do on every occasion. It was, to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do, and I can say with truth that I was never deceived.
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Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
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Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
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I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance.
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Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.
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It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.
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I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
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Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.
Thomas Jefferson
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[All religious sects] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies in which they live.
Thomas Jefferson
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To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others ascribing to himself every human excellence & believing he never claimed any other.
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I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep & a warmer berth below it encircled, with the society of neighbors, friends & fellow laborers of the earth rather than with spies & sycophants ... I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office.
Thomas Jefferson
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It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.
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letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation.
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A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which 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. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
Thomas Jefferson