Thomas Jefferson

I did not invent the proposition that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that men hold natural rights to life and liberty. John Locke wrote it. I read it carefully, agreed with it completely, and put it in the Declaration. The genius of 1776 was not novelty — it was courage: the courage to act on what the best...

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

I prefer the dreams of the future to the history of the past. Every generation is and must be competent to govern itself. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it and what proceeds from it as they please, during their usufruct — all laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. I wrote this in 1800, in the midst of a presidential campaign against John Adams, whose Federalists had passed the Alien and Sedition Acts — laws that criminalised criticism of the government. The battle then was not new; it was the battle that every...

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.

The earth belongs always to the living generation. I proposed this to Madison in 1789: that no law or debt incurred by one generation should bind the next for more than nineteen years — the span in which, statistically, the generation that made the contract has mostly died. Madison thought this impractical. Perhaps it is. But the principle is sound. Each...

The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. I said this in 1787, during Shays' Rebellion, and I meant it as a general principle: governments that cannot bear to...

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.