Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,—entangling alliances with none.

Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.

I sincerely join you in abjuring all political connection with every foreign power; and tho I cordially wish well to the progress of liberty in all nations, and would forever give it the weight of our countenance, yet they are not to be touched without contamination from their other bad principles. Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

I don’t consider myself an isolationist. I consider myself a non-interventionist.

We prefer to be isolated in Odisha. That is a policy of equidistance, and going it alone has served us well in the past.

My ardent desire is, and my aim has been, to comply strictly with all our engagements, foreign and domestic, but to keep the United States free from political connections with every other country; to see that they may be independent of all and under the influence of none.

If you are waging peace, you can't be too particular sometimes about the special attitudes that different countries take. We were a young country once, and our whole policy for the first 150 years was, we were neutral.

There are both things in international law: the principle of territorial integrity and right to self-determination.

We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from Europe.

You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.

I'm for economic independence.

Venezuela is a free country, and we will not be blackmailed by anyone. We will not accept being told what to do over Iran; we will not accept being anyone's colony.

An independent state does not pay too dear a price for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them; a state which has lost its independence may find at least some compensation in the fact that its protector procures for it peace with its neighbours.

I claim for Canada this, that in future Canada shall be at liberty to act or not act, to interfere or not interfere, to do just as she pleases, and that she shall reserve to herself the right to judge whether or not there is cause for her to act.

You know that we are not in the regime-change game. We are against interference in domestic conflicts.

There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

I am an isolationist.

The government should not present the anomaly which it now presents—a government the freest, perhaps the most democratic in the world with reference to local and domestic matters in which you rule yourselves as fully as any people in the world, while in your foreign affairs, your relations with other countries, whether peaceful or warlike, commercial, financial, or otherwise, you may have no more voice than the people of Japan.

Intimately concerned as we are with the system of Europe, it does not follow that we are therefore called upon to mix ourselves on every occasion, with a restless and meddling activity, in the concerns of the nations which surround us.

Let us keep clear of interfering with their [Egypt’s] internal affairs; let us leave reforms to them and their peoples.

There is no nation on the earth that wants, for its security, to depend on anybody else.

As American freemen we can not but sympathize in all efforts to extend the blessings of civil and political liberty, but at the same time we are warned by the admonitions of history and the voice of our own beloved Washington to abstain from entangling alliances with foreign nations. In all disputes between conflicting governments it is our interest not less than our duty to remain strictly neutral

Please don't intervene. Please leave us alone. It is my job and we can cope with this matter. We are trying to explain this to foreigners. But if they do not understand or ignore our explanation, I don't care because we are not begging them for food.

… she [America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication

The Empire is built up on free trade... your Empire is founded on the condition, and it could not have existed until now except on that condition, that every self-governing part of it shall have the right to work out its own prosperity by its own methods.