Thomas Jefferson Should Quotations

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.

Being myself a warm zealot for the attainment & enjoiment by all mankind of as much liberty as each may exercise without injury to the equal liberty of his fellow citizens, I have lamented that in France the endeavors to obtain this should have been attended with the effusion of so much blood.

The hole and the patch should be commensurate.

We should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in Music, Chess, or the merriments of our family companions.

Without health there is no happiness. An attention to health, then, should take the place of every other object.

Nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they should get out of the way and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform.

The dead should not rule the living

I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year.

He [Washington] has often declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it. And these declarations he repeated to me the oftener and the more pointedly.

A professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution [the University of Virginia]

There is a fulness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have a right to advance.

It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also.