“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree.”
“Dependence leads to subservience.”
“Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.”
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
“We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.”
“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”
“A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful Land, traversing all the seas with the rich production of their Industry.”
“It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order.”
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”
“There is a fulness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have a right to advance.”
“A little rebellion is a good thing.”
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”
“Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
“One war, such as that of our Revolution, is enough for one life.”
“Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.”
“Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its happiness.”
“A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.”
“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
“Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable.”
“I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations – to be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promoting in the long run even the interests of both.”
“I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented...”
“With nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.”
“If you are obliged to neglect any thing, let it be your chemistry. It is the least useful and the least amusing to a country gentleman of all the ordinary branches of science.”
“No government should be without critics. If its intentions are good then it has nothing to fear from criticism.”
“The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.”
“It is reasonable that everyone who asks justice should do justice.”
“The failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.”
“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.”
“If I could not go to heaven with but a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore, I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much further from that of the anti-federalists.”
“Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art .”
“Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.”
“We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self – government.”
“We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarrantors of only our own.”
“The worst day in a man’s life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing.”
“The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
“If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
“Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.”
“Power is not alluring to pure minds.”
“Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.”
“If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear it off.”
“I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man.”
“Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.”
“A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government.”
“Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.”
“We prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form and to any people whatever.”
“The chief purpose of government is to protect life. Abandon that and you have abandoned all.”
“I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”
“Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen, people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”
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