The Jefferson Presidency Quotes
They Said It
| "State a moral case to a ploughman 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." - Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10th, 178737 |
| "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." - Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 177638 |
| "Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state? [...] Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 178739 |
| "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 178740 |
| "Those who labor in the earth are the chose people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 178741 |
| "Rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than it is now." - Thomas Jefferson to William Short, January 3rd, 1793, in response to the escalating violence of the French Revolution42 |