“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
“A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not an article for mere consumption, but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”
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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
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A machine for making revolutions is doing precisely the wrong thing at just the right time.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster cruel vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging three headed beast like god one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes fools and hypocrites. ”
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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
“We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.”
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Thomas Jefferson