Thomas Jefferson

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.

I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.

The advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from [the clergy].

In our early struggles for liberty, religious freedom could not fail to become a primary object.

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

I have never conceived that having been in public life required me to belie my sentiments, or to conceal them. Opinion and the just maintenance of it shall never be a crime in my view, nor bring injury on the individual. I never will by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance. I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own; a reserve on these subjects might have procured me more esteem from some people, but less from myself.

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.

Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christians.

The ocean ... like the air, is the common birth-right of mankind.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in-as-much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.

They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people.

This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.

A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest, of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.

the field of knolege is the common property of all mankind

the study of the law is useful in a variety of points of view. it qualifies a man to be useful to himself, to his neighbors, & to the public.

letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation.