Thomas Jefferson II

I cannot live without books.

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

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

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding...