“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
“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 may grow rich by an art I am compelled to follow; I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own judgment; but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve and abhor.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Perceiving the order of nature to be that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue, I am willing to hope it may have ordained that the fall of the wicked shall be the rise of the good.
To J. Correa de Serra, Monticello, Apr. 19, 1814”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. ”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of 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
“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“As new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”
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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
“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
“With your talents and industry, with science, and that steadfast honesty, which eternally pursues right, regardless of consequences, you may promise yourself everything but health, without which there is no happiness.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Altho' I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose Basanistos may be amusing. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro' the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.
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Thomas Jefferson
