2,194 Quotes by Thomas Jefferson

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

It is a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow their end.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god.

The relations which exist between man and his Maker, and the duties resulting from those relations, are the most interesting and important to every human being and the most incumbent on his study and investigation.

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.

Heliotrope. To be sowed in the spring. A delicious flower, but I suspect it must be planted in boxes and kept in the house in the winter. The smell rewards the care.

Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.

None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army

MORAL LAW, Evidence of.- Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him. ... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society ... their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation.