Notes on the State of Virginia Quotes

“Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice cannot be relied on, reject it then, and be the stigma on him. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them. Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. (...) The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading subjugation on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it: for man is an imitative animal.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God?”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“The women are submitted to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people. With such, force is law. The stronger sex therefore imposes on the weaker. It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality. That first teaches us to subdue the selfish passions, and to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves. Were we in equal barbarism, our females would be equal drudges.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“The poor who have neither property, friends, nor strength to labor are boarded in the houses of good farmers, to whom a stipulated sum is annually paid. To those who are able to help themselves a little or have friends from whom they derive some succor, inadequate however to their full maintenance, supplementary aids are given which enable them to live comfortably in their own houses or in the houses of their friends. Vagabonds without visible property or vocation, are placed in work houses, where they are well clothed, fed, lodged, and made to labor”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“2. They urge, that if the convention had meant that this instrument should be alterable, as their other ordinances were, they would have called it an ordinance; but they have called it a constitution, which, ex vi termini, means "an act above the power of the ordinary legislature.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A Compilation of Data About the State's Natural Resources, Economy and the Nature of the Good Society

“The northern parts of their country were granted away to the lords Baltimore and Fairfax; the first of these obtaining also the rights of separate jurisdiction and government.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A Compilation of Data About the State's Natural Resources, Economy and the Nature of the Good Society

“When the first effectual settlement of our colony was made, which was in 1607, the country from the sea-coast to the mountains, and from the Potomac to the most southern waters of James' river, was occupied by upwards of forty different tribes of Indians.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A Compilation of Data About the State's Natural Resources, Economy and the Nature of the Good Society

“Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“I am little acquainted with the phenomenon as it shows itself at sea; but at Monticello it is familiar. There is a solitary mountain about forty miles off in the South, whose natural shape, as presented to view there, is a regular cone; but by the effect of looming, it sometimes subsides almost totally in the horizon; sometimes it rises more acute and more elevated; sometimes it is hemispherical; and sometimes its sides are perpendicular, its top flat, and as broad as its base. In short, it assumes at times the most whimsical shapes, and all these perhaps successively in the same morning.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A Compilation of Data About the State's Natural Resources, Economy and the Nature of the Good Society

“It is said that shells are found in the Andes, in South America, fifteen thousand feet above the level of the ocean. This is considered by many, both of the learned and unlearned, as a proof of an universal deluge.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A Compilation of Data About the State's Natural Resources, Economy and the Nature of the Good Society

“In proportion to their number, [incompatible immigrants] will infuse into [the nation] their spirit, warp or bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“I advance it therefore [...] that the blacks [...] are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“J'aime autant une personne qui me releve d'une erreur, qu'une autre qui m'apprend une verité, parce qu'en effet une erreur corrigée est une verité”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A Compilation of Data About the State's Natural Resources, Economy and the Nature of the Good Society