"The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years."
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Quote collection
Thomas Jefferson quotes (page 27 of 91)
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"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man."
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"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."
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"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape."
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"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe."
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"I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."
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"The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice."
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"Hindsight is an exact science. Hold fast to your dreams, for it dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened."
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"I am anxious to see the doctrine of one god commenced in our state. But the population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented to be an Unitarian by myself, although I know there are many around me who would become so, if once they could hear the questions fairly stated."
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"Neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion. -quoting John Locke's argument."
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"Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality."
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"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. . . . We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
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"The price of barbecue is eternal vigilance."
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"Every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact (casus non faederis) to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits. Without this right, they would be under the dominion, absolute and unlimited, of whosoever might exercise this right of judgment for them."
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"Nothing but a necessity invincible by any other means can justify ... a prostitution of laws, which constitute the pillars of our whole system of jurisprudence."
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"How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests."
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"Female education ... has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters ... I thought it essential to give them a solid education which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be."
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"Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment."
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"[An] act of the Congress of the United States... which assumes powers... not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void and of no force."
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"The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end."
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