“all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."
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Thomas Jefferson
“And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
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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
“It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give happiness.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“If Americans desire to be both ignorant and free, they want what never has been and what never will be.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“It is reasonable that everyone who asks justice should do justice”
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Thomas Jefferson