Great Throughts Treasury

"Do not be too severe upon the errors of the people, but reclaim them by enlightening them." - Thomas Jefferson

"Every people may establish what form of government they please, and change it as they please, the will of the nation being the only thing essential." - Thomas Jefferson

"Experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms [of government], those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson

"For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security." - Thomas Jefferson

"I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another." - Thomas Jefferson

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." - Thomas Jefferson

"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

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be." - Thomas Jefferson

"I tolerate with utmost latitude the right of others to differ with me in opinion without imputing to them criminality. I know too well all the weaknesses and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results." - Thomas Jefferson

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever." - Thomas Jefferson

"I was much an enemy to monarchies before I came to Europe. I am ten thousand times more so, since I have seen what they are. There is scarcely an evil known in these countries, which may not be traced to their king, as its source, nor a good, which is not derived from the small fibres of republicanism existing among them." - Thomas Jefferson

"If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignations, none. [Also quoted: 'Few die and none resign.']" - Thomas Jefferson

"If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation... to a continuance in union... I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.'" - Thomas Jefferson

"If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world it is to your country its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism." - Thomas Jefferson

"In a warm climate, no man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor. 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 of 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 for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!" - Thomas Jefferson

"It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent’s refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father." - Thomas Jefferson

"Let the farmer forevermore be honored in his calling, for they who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." - Thomas Jefferson

"Let this be the distinctive mark of an American that in cases of commotion, he enlists himself under no man's banner, inquires for no man's name, but repairs to the standard of the laws. Do this, and you need never fear anarchy or tyranny. Your government will be perpetual." - Thomas Jefferson

"May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion." - Thomas Jefferson

"Neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion. [quoting John Locke's argument]" - Thomas Jefferson

"No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms [within his own lands]. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson

"No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as of duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails it will be from this weakness." - Thomas Jefferson

"Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away." - Thomas Jefferson

"Responsibility weighs with its heaviest force on a single head." - Thomas Jefferson

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." - Thomas Jefferson

"Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights." - Thomas Jefferson

"The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory." - Thomas Jefferson

"The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning." - Thomas Jefferson

"The sun - my almighty physician." - Thomas Jefferson

"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." - Thomas Jefferson

"The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ... It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best." - Thomas Jefferson

"There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States." - Thomas Jefferson

"This corporeal globe and everything upon it belong to its present corporeal inhabitants during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction; and this declaration can only be made by their majority. That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves." - Thomas Jefferson

"To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other." - Thomas Jefferson

"We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." - Thomas Jefferson

"We are bound, you, I, and every one to make common cause, even with error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience." - Thomas Jefferson

"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed." - Thomas Jefferson

"We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church." - Thomas Jefferson

"Were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, Does he use ardent spirits?" - Thomas Jefferson

"What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate." - Thomas Jefferson

"When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property." - Thomas Jefferson

"When the clergy addressed General Washington on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian or not. They did so. However [Dr. Rush] observed the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice. Rush observes he never did say a word on the subject in any of his public papers except in his valedictory letter to the Governors of the states when he resigned his commission in the army, wherein he speaks of the benign influence of the Christian religion. I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system than he himself did." - Thomas Jefferson

"When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

"BEL-IMPERIA: Oh let me go; for in my troubled eyes, now may'st thou read that life in passion dies. HORATIO: Oh stay a while, and I will die with thee; so shalt thou yield, and yet have conquered me." - Thomas Kyd

"For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn man — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. Strange hours! Strangely enervating labor! Bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann