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The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

Thomas Jefferson

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Thomas Jefferson
Age: 83 †
Born: 1743
Born: April 2
Died: 1826
Died: July 4
3Rd U.S. President
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More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.
Thomas Jefferson
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Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is in their interest to go to war.
Thomas Jefferson
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Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.
Thomas Jefferson
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Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art. To give praise where it is not due, might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature.
Thomas Jefferson
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It is Mortifying to suppose it possible that a people able and zealous to contend with the Enemy should be reduced to fold their Arms for want of the means of defence yet no resources that we know of, ensure us against this event.
Thomas Jefferson
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So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.
Thomas Jefferson
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We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.
Thomas Jefferson
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I can never fear that things will go far wrong where common sense has fair play.
Thomas Jefferson
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Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.
Thomas Jefferson
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An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens.
Thomas Jefferson
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To seek out the best [persons to serve in the government] though the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with ther purest motives, is something incorrect....No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.
Thomas Jefferson
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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.
Thomas Jefferson
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To learn, you have to listen. To improve, you have to try.
Thomas Jefferson
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An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental.
Thomas Jefferson
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... the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character existed.
Thomas Jefferson
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History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume and knowing it, to defeat its views.
Thomas Jefferson
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When the people are afraid of the government, that's tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that's liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
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Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.
Thomas Jefferson
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The government you elect is the government you deserve.
Thomas Jefferson
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It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
Thomas Jefferson