“War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“All, all dead: and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“...it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.
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Thomas Jefferson
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”
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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
“We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.
The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
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Thomas Jefferson
“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
“The laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.”
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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
“New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have
―
Thomas Jefferson
