“May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The pretense that the workings of the mind, like the actions of the body, are subject to the control of laws, does not seem sufficiently demolished. ... The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“[Christianity is] the most ... perverted system that ever shone on man.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If all be true that I do think, there are five reasons we should drink. Good friends, good times, or being dry, or lest we should be by and by, or any other reason why”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollection of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
