“Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.”
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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
“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punished him who gives in to it. And it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.”
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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
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”
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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
“Nothing was or is farther from my intentions, than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed doubt.”
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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
“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
“New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.”
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Thomas Jefferson
