Thomas Jefferson

Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself.

A lottery is a salutary instrument and a tax... laid on the willing only, that is to say, on those who can risk the price of a ticket without sensible injury, for the possibility of a higher prize.

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.

It is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles; and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions.

I never before knew the full value of trees....What would I not give that the trees planted nearest round the house at Monticello were full grown.

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

It is my disposition to maintain peace until its condition shall be made less tolerable than that of war itself.

One insult pocketed soon produces another.

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.

I deem it the duty of every man to devote a certain portion of his income for charitable purposes; and that it is his further duty to see it so applied and to do the most good for which it is capable.

It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance.

What i value more than all things, good humor.

The sun - my almighty physician.

The only true corrective of Constitutional abuses is education.

The eyes of our citizens are not sufficiently open to the true cause of our distress. They ascribe them to everything but their true cause, the banking system

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be ... The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.

A candle loses nothing when it lights another candle.

It should be our endeavor to cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation, even of that which has injured us most.

I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument.