“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden...But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”
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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
“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
“The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“he repudiated the writings of the Apostle Paul," whom he considered the (first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large...”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it. The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.
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Thomas Jefferson
“In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.”
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Thomas Jefferson