Education: Jefferson Quotations
1785. "An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second." (to Peter Carr, 19 August)
1786. "Knowledge indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession." (to Thomas M. Randolph, 27 August)
1789. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." (to Richard Price)
1810.
"No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among
mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its effect
towards supporting free and good government." (to Hugh L. White)
1816. "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day . . . . I believe it [human condition] susceptible of much improvement, and most of all, in matters of government and religion; and that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is effected." (to Dupont de Nemours, 24 April)
1818. "If the children . . . are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences, than it would have done, in their correction, by a good education." (to Joseph C. Cabell)
1818. "A system of general education, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest." (to Joseph C. Cabell)
1820. "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesom discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." (to Wiliam C. Jarvis, 28 September)
1822. "I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man." (to C. C. Blatchly)
--Monticello Research Department, September 1989
Pictured: South Square Room of Monticello, in which Jefferson's wife and daughter taught his children and grandchildren; photograph by Robert C. Lautman