“I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”
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Thomas Jefferson
“As Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “In matters of fashion, swim with the current. In matters of conscience, stand like a rock.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved - the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! With the rational respect that is due to it, knavish priests have added prostitutions of it, that fill or might fill the blackest and bloodiest pages of human history.
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Thomas Jefferson
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the Literature of Negroes. Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their reestablishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.”
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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
“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
“New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
