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letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation.

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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The art of life is the art of avoiding pain and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.
Thomas Jefferson
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Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick . . . Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history . . . should be rendered . . . worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.
Thomas Jefferson
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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.
Thomas Jefferson
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I believe the states can best govern our home concerns, and the general government our foreign ones.
Thomas Jefferson
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History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson
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They are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes.
Thomas Jefferson
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I served with General Washington in die Legislature of Virginia...and...with Doctor Franklin in Congress. I never heard neither of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.
Thomas Jefferson
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The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.
Thomas Jefferson
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One imputation in particular has been repeated till it seems as if some at least believed it: that I am an enemy to commerce. They admit me a friend of agriculture, and suppose me an enemy to the only means of disposing of its produce.
Thomas Jefferson
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Honesty and interest are as intimately connected in the public as in the private code of morality.
Thomas Jefferson
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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.
Thomas Jefferson
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The only security of all is in a free press.
Thomas Jefferson
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I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things but they would have been done by others some of them, perhaps, a little better.
Thomas Jefferson
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No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.
Thomas Jefferson
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Men as well as rivers grow crooked by following the path of least resistance.
Thomas Jefferson
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The cement of this union is the heart-blood of every American.
Thomas Jefferson
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I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.
Thomas Jefferson
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He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time.
Thomas Jefferson
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Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
Thomas Jefferson
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All the world would be Christian if they were taught the pure Gospel of Christ!.
Thomas Jefferson