Thomas Jefferson Education Quotes

#1. Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large ...

Thomas Jefferson

#2. No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in it's effect towards supporting free & good government.

Thomas Jefferson

#3. To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

Thomas Jefferson

#4. We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education.

Thomas Jefferson

#5. Above all I hope that the education of the common people will be attended to so they won't forget the basic principles of freedom.

Thomas Jefferson

#6. The objects of this primary education ... would be ... to form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend.

Thomas Jefferson

#7. I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.

Thomas Jefferson

#8. If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.

Thomas Jefferson

#9. If our legislature does not heartily push our University [of Virginia] we must send our children for education to Kentucky [Transylvania College] or Cambridge [Harvard College]. The latter will return them to us as fanatics and tories, the former will keep them to add to their population.

Thomas Jefferson

#10. Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick ... Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history ... should be rendered ... worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.

Thomas Jefferson

#11. All the States but our own are sensible that knowlege is power.

Thomas Jefferson

#12. The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes
the laboring and the learned. The laboring will need the first grade of education to qualify them for their pursuits and duties; the learned will need it as a foundation for further acquirements.

Thomas Jefferson

#13. There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe: the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Thomas Jefferson

#15. The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance

Thomas Jefferson

#16. This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

Thomas Jefferson

#17. It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.

Thomas Jefferson

#18. People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.

Thomas Jefferson

#19. The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.

Thomas Jefferson

#20. Female education ... has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters ... I thought it essential to give them a solid education which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be ...

Thomas Jefferson

#21. If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.

Thomas Jefferson

#22. There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.

Thomas Jefferson

#23. Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.

Thomas Jefferson

#24. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.

Thomas Jefferson

#25. It is highly interesting to our country, and it is the duty of its functionaries, to provide that every citizen in it should receive an education proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his life.

Thomas Jefferson

#26. But of all the views of this law [universal education] none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

#27. The only true corrective of Constitutional abuses is education.

Thomas Jefferson

#28. Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.

Thomas Jefferson

#29. Of all the errors which can possibly be committed to the education of youth, that of sending them to Europe is the most fatal. I see [clearly] that no American should come to Europe under 30 years of age.

Thomas Jefferson

#30. Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity

Thomas Jefferson

#31. The only foundation for useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion.

Thomas Jefferson

#32. 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