Thomas Jefferson citations (458 citations, Page 11)

Thomas Jefferson: 458 citations 0 J'aime

Thomas Jefferson Citations

“Que nous faut-il pour faire de nous un peuple heureux et prospère? Un gouvernement sage et frugal, qui retiendra les hommes de se porter tort l'un à l'autre, et pour le reste les laissera libres de régler leurs propres efforts d'industrie et de progrès, et n'enlèvera pas de la bouche du travailleur le pain qu'il a gagné. Voilà le résumé du bon gouvernement, et voilà ce qui est nécessaire pour boucler le cercle de nos félicités. »”

Thomas Jefferson

With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens,—A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
en
Premier discours inaugural, 4 mars 1801

effort , faute , hommes

“Chez vous, chers citoyens, vous-mêmes savez au mieux si nous avons fait bien ou mal. La suppression d'agences non nécessaires, d'inutiles établissements et dépenses, nous a permis d'interrompre nos taxes internes. Celles-ci couvrant notre terre d'agents, et ouvrant nos portes à leurs intrusions, avaient déjà entamé ce processus de sanction intime qui, une fois lancé, peut rarement être empêché d'atteindre successivement chaque article de produit et de propriété.”

Thomas Jefferson

At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property.
en
Second discours inaugural, 4 mars 1805

foi

Thomas Jefferson: Citations en anglais

“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Judge John Tyler http://www.constitution.org/tj/jeff11.txt (June 28, 1804); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 11, page 33
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

“Blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Count Diodati (29 March 1807)
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

“We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations, as with individuals, our interests, soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties; and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is taken on its word, when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.”

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Thomas Jefferson

1800s, Second Inaugural Address (1805)

“In England, where judges were named and removable at the will of an hereditary executive, from which branch most misrule was feared, and has flowed, it was a great point gained, by fixing them for life, to make them independent of that executive. But in a government founded on the public will, this principle operates in an opposite direction, and against that will. There, too, they were still removable on a concurrence of the executive and legislative branches. But we have made them independent of the nation itself. They are irremovable, but by their own body, for any depravities of conduct, and even by their own body for the imbecilities of dotage. The justices of the inferior courts are self- chosen, are for life, and perpetuate their own body in succession forever, so that a faction once possessing themselves of the bench of a county, can never be broken up, but hold their county in chains, forever indissoluble. Yet these justices are the real executive as well as judiciary, in all our minor and most ordinary concerns. They tax us at will; fill the office of sheriff, the most important of all the executive officers of the county; name nearly all our military leaders, which leaders, once named, are removable but by themselves. The juries, our judges of all fact, and of law when they choose it, are not selected by the people, nor amenable to them. They are chosen by an officer named by the court and executive. Chosen, did I say? Picked up by the sheriff from the loungings of the court yard, after everything respectable has retired from it. Where then is our republicanism to be found? Not in our constitution certainly, but merely in the spirit of our people. That would oblige even a despot to govern us republicanly. Owing to this spirit, and to nothing in the form of our constitution, all things have gone well. But this fact, so triumphantly misquoted by the enemies of reformation, is not the fruit of our constitution, but has prevailed in spite of it. Our functionaries have done well, because generally honest men. If any were not so, they feared to show it.”

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Thomas Jefferson

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

“If treasury bills are emitted on a tax appropriated for their redemption in fifteen years, and (to insure preference in the first moments of competition) bearing an interest of six per cent, there is no one who would not take them in preference to the bank paper now afloat, on a principle of patriotism as well as interest; and they would be withdrawn from circulation into private hoards to a considerable amount. Their credit once established, others might be emitted, bottomed also on a tax, but not bearing interest; and if ever their credit faltered, open public loans, on which these bills alone should be received as specie. These, operating as a sinking fund, would reduce the quantity in circulation, so as to maintain that in an equilibrium with specie. It is not easy to estimate the obstacles which, in the beginning, we should encounter in ousting the banks from their possession of the circulation; but a steady and judicious alternation of emissions and loans would reduce them in time.”

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Thomas Jefferson

ME http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/eppes.html 13:275
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

“Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have … The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Commonly quoted on many websites, this quotation is actually from an address by President Gerald Ford to the US Congress (12 August 1974) http://www.bartleby.com/73/714.html
Misattributed

“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.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Alexander von Humboldt (6 December 1813)
Scanned letter at The Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mtj1&fileName=mtj1page047.db&recNum=74&itemLink=/ammem/mtjhtml/mtjser1.html&linkText=7
Transcript at The Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mtj:@field(DOCID+@lit(tj110127))
1810s

“Life's visions are vanished, it's dreams are no more.
Dear friends of my bosom, why bathed in tears?
I go to my fathers; I welcome the shore,
which crowns all my hopes, or which buries my cares.
Then farewell my dear, my lov'd daughter, Adieu!
The last pang in life is in parting from you.
Two Seraphs await me, long shrouded in death;
I will bear them your love on my last parting breath.”

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Thomas Jefferson

"A death-bed Adieu from Th. J. to M. R." Jefferson's poem to his eldest child, Martha "Patsy" Randolph, written during his last illness in 1826. http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/tj.html Two days before his death, Jefferson told Martha that in a certain drawer in an old pocket book she would find something intended for her. https://books.google.com/books?id=1F3fPa1LWVQC&pg=PA429&dq=%22in+a+certain+drawer+in+an+old+pocket+book%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NDa2VJX_OYOeNtCpg8gM&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22in%20a%20certain%20drawer%20in%20an%20old%20pocket%20book%22&f=false The "two seraphs" refer to Jefferson's deceased wife and younger daughter. His wife, Martha (nicknamed "Patty"), died in 1782; his daughter Mary (nicknamed "Polly" and also "Maria," died in 1804
1820s

“In the middle ages of Christianity opposition to the State opinions was hushed. The consequence was, Christianity became loaded with all the Romish follies. Nothing but free argument, raillery & even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-02_Bk.pdf, p. 256
1770s

“With respect to modern languages, French, as I have before observed, is indispensible. Next to this the Spanish is most important to an American. Our connection with Spain is already important and will become daily more so. Besides this the antient part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish.”

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Thomas Jefferson

1780s, Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph (1787)

“The habit of using ardent spirit, by men in public office, has occasioned more injury to the public service, and more trouble to me, than any other circumstance which has occurred in the internal concerns of the country, during my administration. And were I to commence my administration again, with the knowledge which from experience I have acquired, the first question which I would ask, with regard to every candidate for public office, should be, "Is he addicted to the use of ardent spirit?"”

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Thomas Jefferson

Attributed by an unnamed "distinguished officer of the United States Government" in the Sixth Report of the American Temperance Society, May, 1833, pp. 10-11 http://books.google.com/books?id=h_c0wbAOQ5kC&pg=PA237&dq=%22The+habit+of+using+ardent+spirit%22.
Later variant: Were I to commence my administration again,... the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, "Does he use ardent spirits?"
Attributed

“Your favour of July 31, was duly received, and was read with peculiar pleasure. The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor to both the head and heart of the writer. Mine on the subject of slavery of negroes have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. 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, and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reprobation.”

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Thomas Jefferson

1810s, Letter to Edward Coles (1814)

“The Pennsylvania legislature, who, on a proposition to make the belief in God a necessary qualification for office, rejected it by a great majority, although assuredly there was not a single atheist in their body. And you remember to have heard, that when the act for religious freedom was before the Virginia Assembly, a motion to insert the name of Jesus Christ before the phrase, "the author of our holy religion," which stood in the bill, was rejected, although that was the creed of a great majority of them.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Albert Gallatin (16 June 1817). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, p. 73
1810s

“Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations. No duty is at the same time more difficult to fulfil. The knowledge of character possessed by a single individual is of necessity limited. To seek out the best through the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest motives, is sometimes incorrect.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Paraphrased in John B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States (ii. 586): "One sentence will undoubtedly be remembered till our republic ceases to exist. 'No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying,' [Jefferson] observed, 'as to put the right man in the right place.'"
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Richard Price (8 January 1789)
1780s

“I thought Congress had taken their ground firmly for continuing their embargo till June, and then war. But a sudden and unaccountable revolution of opinion took place the last week, chiefly among the New England and New York members, and in a kind of panic they voted the 4th of March for removing the embargo, and by such a majority as gave all reason to believe they would not agree either to war or non-intercourse. This, too, was after we had become satisfied that the Essex Junto had found their expectation desperate, of inducing the people there either to separation or forcible opposition. The majority of Congress, however, has now rallied to the removing the embargo on the 4th March, non-intercourse with France and Great Britain, trade everywhere else, and continuing war preparations. The further details are not yet settled, but I believe it is perfectly certain that the embargo will be taken off the 4th of March.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph (7 February 1809) on the termination of the American embargo.
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

“The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. 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.”

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Thomas Jefferson

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior…. The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America…Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.”

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Thomas Jefferson livre Notes on the State of Virginia

Query XIV
1780s, Notes on the State of Virginia

“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Quoted in [1906, Six Historic Americans, John E., Remsburg, chapter 2, New York, The Truth Seeker Company, 13504056M, 2219498, 74, http://www.archive.org/details/sixhistoricameri00rems], who claimed it to be from a letter to "Dr. Woods." The full letter is never reproduced, and the Jefferson Foundation lists http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/superstition-christianity-quotation the quotation as spurious.
Disputed

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

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to James Ogilvie (4 August 1811)
1810s

“The priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that no one who reads the sophistications they have engrafted on it, from the jargon of Plato, of Aristotle & other mystics, would conceive these could have been fathered on the sublime preacher of the sermon on the mount.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (13 October 1815). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, p. 492
1810s

“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.. [a] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s32.html James Madison (28 October 1785)
1780s

“Th. Jefferson returns his thanks to Dr. De La Motta for the eloquent discourse on the Consecration of the Synagogue of Savannah, which he has been so kind as to send him. It excites in him the gratifying reflection that his country has been the first to prove to the world two truths, the most salutary to human society, that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against religious dissension: the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is "divided we stand, united, we fall."”

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Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson to Jacob De La Motta, September 1, 1820. Manuscript Division, Papers of Thomas Jefferson. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/loc/madison.html For the background of the letter see "Thomas Jefferson's Letter on Religious Freedom" Dr. Kenneth Libo Ph.D and Michael Skakun from the Center for Jewish History, New York City, New York. http://sephardicoralhistory.org/education/essays.php?action=show&id=19
1820s

“Whether the succeeding generation is to be more virtuous than their predecessors, I cannot say; but I am sure they will have more worldly wisdom, and enough, I hope, to know that honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Nathaniel Macon (12 January 1819) http://books.google.com/books?id=oiYWAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Honesty+is+the+first+chapter+in+the+book+of+wisdom%22&pg=PA112#v=onepage
1810s

“All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Draft Constitution for Virginia (June 1776) http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffcons.asp
1770s

“I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.”

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Thomas Jefferson

1780s, Letter to the Marquis de Chastellux (1785)

“He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to William Canby (18 September 1813)
1810s

“Put down all banks, admit none but a metallic circulation that will take its proper level with the like circulation in other countries, and then our manufacturers may work in fair competition with those of other countries, and the import duties which the government may lay for the purposes of revenue will so far place them above equal competition.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Charles Pinckney (1820) ME 15:280
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.”

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Thomas Jefferson

Letter, Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, 1821: ME 15-341, as quoted in The Assault on Reason, Al Gore, A&C Black (2012, reprint), p. 87 : ISBN 1408835800, 9781408835807, and Federal Jurisdiction, Form #05.018, Sovereignty Education and Defense Ministry (2012)
1820s