"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."
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Quote collection
Thomas Jefferson quotes (page 41 of 91)
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"The rights of the people to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods."
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"I hope the necessity will at length be seen of establishing institutions, here as in Europe, where every branch of science, useful at this day, may be taught in it's highest degrees."
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"I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence."
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"We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it."
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"We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society."
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"I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too."
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"Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind."
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"Motherhood is the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness."
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"Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun."
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"If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong."
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"It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united."
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"It is a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow their end."
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"[T]o preserve the republican form and principles of our Constitution and cleave to the salutary distribution of powers which that [the Constitution] has established . . . are the two sheet anchors of our Union. If driven from either, we shall be in danger of foundering."
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"Legislators invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind."
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"The construction applied . . . to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power . . . ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers, nor a part to be so taken as to destroy the whole residue of that instrument."
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"Agriculture is at the same time the most tranquil, healthy, and independent occupation."
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"I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the Union into two or more parts."
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"The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral."
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"We must use a good deal of economy in our wood, never cutting down new, where we can make the old do."
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