Top 15 Thomas Jefferson Quotes

I cannot live without books.

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. 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.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.