Quote

We abhor the follies of war, and are not untried in its distresses and calamities. Unmeddling with the affairs of other nations, we had hoped that our distance and our dispositions would have left us free, in the example and indulgence of peace with all the world.

Thomas Jefferson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Jefferson
Age: 83 †
Born: 1743
Born: April 2
Died: 1826
Died: July 4
3Rd U.S. President
Archaeologist
Architect
Cryptographer
Diplomat
Farmer
Inventor
Jurist
Lawyer
Philosopher
Politician
Slaveholder
President Jefferson
T. Jefferson
Example
Calamity
Nations
Indulgence
Untried
Free
Disposition
Distresses
Peace
Distress
Abhor
War
Affairs
Calamities
Left
Folly
Dispositions
Would
Affair
Follies
World
Distance
Hoped

More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

Image
I hold it certain that to open the doors of truth and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
I learn with great concern that [one] portion of our frontier so interesting, so important, and so exposed, should be so entirely unprovided with common fire-arms. I did not suppose any part of the United States so destitute of what is considered as among the first necessaries of a farm-house.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
History teaches the young the virtues of freedom. By apprising them of the past it will enable them to judge the future.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Nothing can now be believed that is seen in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise, in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Without health there is no happiness. An attention to health, then, should take the place of every other object.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Religions are all the same...Based upon legends and fantasies
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
[The people] are in truth the only legitimate proprietors of the soil and government.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.
Thomas Jefferson