- Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.
- But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
- Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
- We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.
- No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.
- You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
- All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.
- I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
- Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty but it is religion and morality alone that can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.
- A revolution of government is the strongest proof that can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense.
- Facts are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence
- There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
- [last words]: Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson) still survives.
- The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.
- I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
- In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
- One day these Thirteen Colonies will form the greatest empire on Earth. (written in 1755 when he was 20 years old)
- [on the position of Vice President, which he was the first to occupy] My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content