Jefferson read daily the New Testament.
The motto of his seal-ring, chosen by himself, was "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them." It was Jefferson linking of popular sovereignity with liberty, both rooted in a divine plan, which gave the American colonists such a strong, clear, and plausible conceptual basis for their action. The rebels rapidly won the ideological battle.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
"State a problem to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it often better than the latter."
Jefferson was a passionate idealist, an intellectual Puritan.
Jefferson hated slavery, feared it, reviled it, and sought in vain both to curtail it publicly and to cut it out of his own life. His "Notes on the State of Virginia" (1781) is such an outspoken denunciation of slavery on almost every ground that he told James Monroe that he hesitated to publish it, because "the terms in which I speak of slavery and of our Constitution [in Virginia] may produce an irritation which will revolt the minds of our countrymen against the reform of these two articles, and thus do more harm than good." He argued that slavery was not just an economic evil, which destroy "industry," but a moral one which degraded the slave-owners even more than the slave. He wanted outright abolition, and none of the future abolitionists from the North argued more fervently or more comprehensively against the "peculiar institution." Friends, including Virginians, urged him to publish and he did so, insuring that a number of copies were put in the library of William and Mary College, so that the young would read it.
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep for ever." (About Slavery).
