“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
“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened. --”
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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
“...legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The object most interesting to me for the residue of my life, will be to see you both developing daily those principles of virtue and goodness which will make you valuable to others and happy in yourselves, and acquiring those talents and that degree of science which will guard you at all times against ennui, the most dangerous poison of life. A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity....In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is...”
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Thomas Jefferson
“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“[Christianity is] the most ... perverted system that ever shone on man.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God?”
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Thomas Jefferson
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
