“There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.”
“Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.”
“It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.”
“I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”
“Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.”
“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them.”
“Nothing can be believed but what one sees, or has from an eye witness.”
“It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it.”
“If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.”
“Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable for, not the rightness, but the uprightness of the decision.”
“The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”
“The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.”
“The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor I.”
“Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.”
“Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.”
“This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.”
“Lethargy is the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”
“Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow.”
“The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.”
“My most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure and perpetual.”
“The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
“In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve.”
“The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticism, fancies, and falsehoods.”
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.”
“Let common sense and common honesty have fair play, and they will soon set things to rights.”
“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.”
“I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?”
“There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.”
“I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.”
“Malice will always find bad motives for good actions. – Shall we therefore never do good?”
“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.”
“Victory and defeat are each of the same price.”
“As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers.”
“The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union.”
“If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope that common sense will suffice to do everything else.”
“The same political parties which now agitiate the US have existed through all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.”
“Easter was when they nailed Him to the cross. And He never said a mumbling word.”
“Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.”
“I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”
“The law of self-preservation is higher than written law.”
“I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man.”
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”
“Man is not made for the State but the State for man and it derives its just powers only from the consent of the governed.”
“It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.”
“Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.”
“There is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose.”
“Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.”
“Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is in their interest to go to war.”
“Cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens.”
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