Thomas Jefferson

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

I find as I grow older, I love those most, whom I loved first.

Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (1984, Library of America edition; see discussion of sources at . There are numerous one-volume collections; this is perhaps the best place to start.

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

In matters of principal stand like a rock.

Smith, James Morton, ed. The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826, 3 vols. (1995)

I am not afraid to appeal to the nation at large, to posterity, and still less to that Being Who sees Himself our motives, Who will judge us from His own knowledge of them.

I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.

My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ[.]

The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments: zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology, or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral.

It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.