Top 100 Jefferson We Quotes
#1. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.
William James
#2. Where thought is free in its range, we need never fear to hazard what is good in itself.
Thomas Jefferson
#3. As Christians, God doesn't promise us an easy life, but he does promise to be with us in whatever we go through. He will never leave us or forsake us.
Jefferson Bethke
#4. Only when we humbly call on God to speak into our lives - knowing if he doesn't, we won't succeed - are we actually in a safe place.
Jefferson Bethke
#5. We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.
Thomas Jefferson
#6. Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
Thomas Jefferson
#7. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
Thomas Jefferson
#8. If you will not have it thus: if in the pride of power, if in contempt of reason and reliance upon force, you say we shall not go, but shall remain as subjects to you, then, gentlemen of the North, a war is to be inaugurated the like of which men have not seen ...
Jefferson Davis
#9. We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.
Thomas Jefferson
#10. The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches. We must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
Thomas Jefferson
#11. We've become slaves to words like 'local,' 'fresh,' and 'seasonal.' We all want to be Thomas Jefferson's agrarian hero, but sustainable food is a difficult beast.
Barton Seaver
#12. As computers have become more powerful, computer graphics have advanced to the point where it's possible to create photo-realistic images. The bottleneck wasn't, 'How do we make pixels prettier?' It was, 'How do we engage with them more?'
Jefferson Han
#14. Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. For not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. And were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.
Thomas Jefferson
#15. The more ignorant we become the less value we set on science, and the less inclination we shall have to seek it.
Thomas Jefferson
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
#21. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.
Thomas Jefferson
#22. If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ... Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.
Thomas Jefferson
#23. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
Thomas Jefferson
#24. At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams.
Thomas Jefferson
#25. God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever." (Thomas Jefferson)
John Price
#26. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.
Thomas Jefferson
#27. Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.
Thomas Jefferson
#28. We exist, and are quoted, as standing proofs that a government, so modeled as to rest continually on the will of the whole society, is a practicable government.
Thomas Jefferson
#29. We are here lounging our time away, doing nothing, and having nothing to do. It gives me great regret to be passing my time so uselessly when it could have been so importantly employed at home.
Thomas Jefferson
#30. We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists
Thomas Jefferson
#31. When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air and it came down, it would hit an autoworker because the Chrysler Jefferson plant where my husband worked was very close also to where we lived.
Grace Lee Boggs
#32. We're tying off string at the edge of Hampton's claim when I notice Jefferson staring at me. "You don't have to watch my eyes," I grumble. "When I sense gold, I'll tell you straight."
"That's not why I'm looking," he replies, and Hampton fails to keep the grin from his face.
Rae Carson
#34. Taste cannot be controlled by law. We must resist at all costs any attempt to regulate our individual freedoms and to legislate our personal moralities.
Thomas Jefferson
#35. My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.
Thomas Jefferson
#36. In reviewing the history of the times through which we have passed, no portion of it gives greater satisfaction or reflection, than that which represents the efforts of the friends of religious freedom and the success with which they are crowned.
Thomas Jefferson
#37. God should get a lot more glory for things than we give him.
Jefferson Bethke
#38. To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement
Thomas Jefferson
#39. All things here appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner andsupper and to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same: so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day.
Thomas Jefferson
#40. I have been happy ... in believing that ... whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never give up our Union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators.
Thomas Jefferson
#41. In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also.
Thomas Jefferson
#43. We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest.
Thomas Jefferson
#45. We are sensible of the duty and expediency of submitting our opinions to the will of the majority, and can wait with patience till they get right if they happen to be at any time wrong.
Thomas Jefferson
#46. Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.
Ronald Reagan
#47. I have much confidence that we shall proceed successfully for ages to come. My hope of its duration is built much on the enlargement of the resources of life going hand in hand with the enlargement of territory.
Thomas Jefferson
#48. It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterward.
Thomas Jefferson
#49. It is not to the moderation and justice of others we are to trust for fair and equal access to market with out productions, or for our due share in the transportation of them; but to our own means of independence, and the firm will to use them.
Thomas Jefferson
#50. It is Mortifying to suppose it possible that a people able and zealous to contend with the Enemy should be reduced to fold their Arms for want of the means of defence; yet no resources that we know of, ensure us against this event.
Thomas Jefferson
#51. For the present we may groupe the sciences into Professorships as follows, subject however to be changed according to the qualifications of the persons we may be able to engage.
Thomas Jefferson
#52. I am sure that in estimating every man's value either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and that learning and talents are only the second.
Thomas Jefferson
#53. We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.
Jefferson Bethke
#54. Honesty, disinterestedness and good nature are indispensable to procure the esteem and confidence of those with whom we live, and on whose esteem our happiness depends.
Thomas Jefferson
#55. Brave men don't fight for nothing, like children.' protested Howell's (Major Joe Howell) friend. 'We want to know what we are fighting about. If we are wrong we may apologize.
Herbert Asbury
#56. If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope that common sense will suffice to do everything else.
Thomas Jefferson
#57. There were four million people in the American Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!
Mort Sahl
#58. Good humor, Jefferson added, "is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration;
Jon Meacham
#59. I don't know what we did without Velcro in the American theater. It's a miracle substance! People had long intermissions, probably.
Jefferson Mays
#60. Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music. We
John Green
#61. The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.
Thomas Jefferson
#62. The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.
Thomas Jefferson
#63. Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.
Thomas Jefferson
#64. God uniquely highlights marriage as one of the main ways we know who he is and how he relates to us.
Jefferson Bethke
#65. The provisions we have made [for our government] are such as please ourselves; they answer the substantial purposes of government and of justice, and other purposes than these should not be answered.
Thomas Jefferson
#66. Trying to live without community is like trying to live without oxygen. We weren't created to do it.
Jefferson Bethke
#67. The most dangerous thing about the human heart is that we want to reverse the roles by making God the responder and us the initiators.
Jefferson Bethke
#68. Your Seer needs my help to do somethin' she can't. To join the ti-bon-age, mend the seams she ripped herself."
Link didn't understand either. "T-bone what? What kinda steak are we talkin' about here?
Kami Garcia
#69. As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.1 - THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775
Jon Meacham
#70. In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them
Thomas Jefferson
#71. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them [the British] and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
Thomas Jefferson
#72. Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.
Joseph J. Ellis
#73. Questioning our government's actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure
Barbara Kingsolver
#74. We all come in with baggage. We all come in trying to find our way. We all come in with broken edges.
Jefferson Bethke
#75. We went on stage with the Jefferson Airplane, Jim started singing with Grace Slick and hugging her. Then he danced off the stage, went back into the dressing room and passed out cold.
Ray Manzarek
#76. She and Don were taken to a hangar where a pair of F-15 fighter jets were waiting: his and hers, as it turned out. "Why?" Don asked uneasily. "We're taking you to the U.S.S. William Jefferson Clinton." "An aircraft carrier?
Thomas Waite
#77. I think too many times as Christians, we confuse benefits with essence. We pursue the benefits of a relationship rather than the essence of that relationship.
Jefferson Bethke
#78. We're only human James, bound by flesh and blood to do the wrong thing." ~Lena Jefferson from The Other Sister
Cheri Paris Edwards
#79. By ... [selecting] the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated.
Thomas Jefferson
#80. From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.
Jon Meacham
#81. All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.
Thomas Jefferson
#82. From the dissensions among Sects themselves arise necessarily a right of choosing and necessity of deliberating to which we will conform. But if we choose for ourselves, we must allow others to choose also, and so reciprocally, this establishes religious liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
#83. There is a ripeness of time for death,
regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for
another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.
Thomas Jefferson
#84. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Thomas Jefferson
#85. Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth; and I am sure ... we both value too much the freedom of opinion sanctioned by our Constitution, not to cherish its exercise even where in opposition to ourselves.
Thomas Jefferson
#86. Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.
Thomas Jefferson
#87. Thomas Jefferson believed that to preserve the very foundations of our nation, we would need dramatic change from time to time. Well, my fellow citizens, this is our time. Let us embrace it.
William J. Clinton
#88. The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.
Thomas Jefferson
#89. We don't celebrate the gift of Jesus on Christmas. We celebrate the gifts we get.
Jefferson Bethke
#90. The war ... must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks ... unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence,and that, or extermination, we WILL have.
Jefferson Davis
#91. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
Thomas Jefferson
#92. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
Thomas Jefferson
#93. My "Christianity" was once again just the American religion of work hard, do good, feel good, and maybe God will say, "We good.
Jefferson Bethke
#94. Our lives on earth aren't just placeholders until we go to heaven. We are to create, cultivate, and redeem while we're here. The misconception, I've realized, has come from a lack of knowledge of why we were created.
Jefferson Bethke
#95. One of the most dangerous things about the Bible is that it is big enough to say whatever we want it to say if we are willing to remove the context.
Jefferson Bethke
#96. We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.
Thomas Jefferson
#97. We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication .
Thomas Jefferson
#98. If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.
Thomas Jefferson
#99. [T]o preserve the republican form and principles of our Constitution and cleave to the salutary distribution of powers which that [the Constitution] has established ... are the two sheet anchors of our Union. If driven from either, we shall be in danger of foundering.
Thomas Jefferson
#100. If we could believe that Jesus ... countenanced the follies, falsehoods and charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, ... the conclusion would be irresistible ... that he was an imposter.
Thomas Jefferson
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