"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."
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Quote collection
Thomas Jefferson quotes (page 44 of 91)
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"Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics."
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"Common sense is the foundation of all authorities, of the laws themselves, and of their construction."
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"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people."
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"I never before knew the full value of trees. Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read and receive my company."
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"God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men."
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"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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"The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen states in the course of eleven years, is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of government prevent insurrections."
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"None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army"
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"What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?"
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"It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail."
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"I have come to a resolution myself as I hope every good citizen will, never again to purchase any article of foreign manufacture which can be had of American make, be the difference of price what it may."
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"Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth."
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"I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast . . . would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it."
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"We could in the United States make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kinds, but doubtless as good."
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"I find as I grow older that I love those most whom I loved first."
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"Whiskey claims to itself alone the exclusive office of sot-making."
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"But whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re- establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family."
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"The principles on which we engaged, of which the charter of our independence is the record, were sanctioned by the laws of our being, and we but obeyed them in pursuing undeviatingly the course they called for. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights."
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"We are now trusting to those who are against us in position and principle, to fashion to their own form the minds and affections of our youth... This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once, will be beyond remedy."
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