"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."
"It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth."
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Source: Early history of the University of Virginia : as contained in the letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell, hitherto unpublished. Book by Thomas Jefferson, 1856.
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"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom."
"The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations."
"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend."
"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."