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Founders' Quote Database

Thomas Jefferson

First Inaugural Address — 1801
Category: Republican Government
Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Thomas Jefferson

Rights of British America — 1774
Category: Laws of Nature
That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Dupont de Nemours — 1816
Category: Education
Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to John Taylor — 1816
Category: Budget
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Thomas Jefferson

on Alexander Hamilton in The Anas
Category: Founders on Founders
Hamilton was indeed a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched & perverted by the British example, as to be under thoro' conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.

Thomas Jefferson

Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV — 1781
Category: The People
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Joel Barlow — 1807
Category: Education
People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Edward Carrington — 1787
Category: Education
Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Shelton Gilliam — 1808
Category: Budget
The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys.

Thomas Jefferson

First Inaugural Address — 1801
Category: International Relations
Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

Thomas Jefferson

Letter to William Hunter — 1790
Category: Republican Government
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Elbridge Gerry — 1797
Category: The Presidency
The second office of this government is honorable & easy, the first is but a splendid misery.

Thomas Jefferson

fair copy of the drafts of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 — 1798
Category: Constitution
In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Thomas Cooper — 1802
Category: Bureaucracy
If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

Thomas Jefferson

commenting on judges' apparel
Category: Judiciary
Jefferson was against any needless official apparel, but if the gown was to carry, he said: "For Heaven's sake discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum."

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Monsieur A. Coray — 1823
Category: Judiciary
At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Judge Spencer Roane — 1821
Category: Judiciary
The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Archibald Stewart — 1791
Category: Liberty
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson, on Jefferson, in — 1800
Category: Founders on Founders
I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson to Bancroft — 1788
Category: Property
He who is permitted by law to have no property of his own, can with difficulty conceive that property is founded in anything but force.

Thomas Jefferson

Notes on the state of Virginia — 1782
Category: Law
We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to Mary Jefferson Eppes — 1798
Category: Marriage
Harmony in the married state is the very first object to be aimed at.

Thomas Jefferson

First Inaugural Address — 1801
Category: Opinion
Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to John Randolph — 1803
Category: Opinion
Experience having long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish.

Thomas Jefferson

letter to John Adams — 1796
Category: Political Leaders
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.

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