"Knowledge indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession."
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Thomas Jefferson quotes (page 17 of 91)
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"I apprehend... that the total abandonment of the principle of rotation in the offices of President and Senator will end in abuse."
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
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"Such is the moral construction of the world that no national crime passes unpunished in the long run... Were present oppressors to reflect on the same truth, they would spare to their own countries the penalties on their present wrongs which will be inflicted on them in future times. The seeds of hatred and revenge which they sow with a large hand will not fail to produce their fruits in time. Like their brother robbers on the highway, they suppose the escape of the moment a final escape and deem infamy and future risk countervailed by present gain."
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"Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights."
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"The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism."
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"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."
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"I have wished to see chemistry applied to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally, to the making of bread, butter, cheese, soap, to the incubation of eggs, &c."
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"[The Federal Convention] is really an assembly of demigods."
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"The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties."
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
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"I believe the states can best govern our home concerns, and the general government our foreign ones."
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"When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality."
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"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
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"I have not observed mens honesty to increase with their riches."
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"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?"
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"There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites."
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"While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil."
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"In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue."
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"No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden."
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