Thomas Jefferson Earth Quotations

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on the earth.

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests.

I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

No society can make a perpetual constitution... The earth belongs always to the living generation.

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen, people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

Our attachment to no nation on earth should supplant our attachment to liberty.

A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences

When earth is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance and of the best quality.

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.

Cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens.