“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrant. It is its natural manure.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“When we see religion split into so many thousand of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself.
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Thomas Jefferson
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The care of human life and happiness, and their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of a good government.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing 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
“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world,and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men women and children since the introduction of Christianity,have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment...But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“… the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”
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Thomas Jefferson
