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The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.
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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President Jefferson
T. Jefferson
Flames
Feeble
Contrary
Despotism
Spread
Consume
Work
July
Much
Globe
Globes
Engines
Kindled
Fourth
Extinguished
More quotes by Thomas Jefferson
When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil while fretting and fuming only serves to increase your own torments.
Thomas Jefferson
Defend our liberties and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindred and tongues.
Thomas Jefferson
ONLY a government that is AFRAID of its citizens tries to control them.
Thomas Jefferson
The Creator has not thought proper to mark those in the forehead who are of stuff to make good generals. We are first, therefore, to seek them blindfold, and then let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses.
Thomas Jefferson
How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests.
Thomas Jefferson
When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.
Thomas Jefferson
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
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Thomas Jefferson
None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army
Thomas Jefferson
Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.
Thomas Jefferson
Having always observed that public works are much less advantageously managed than the same are by private hands, I have thought it better for the public to go to market for whatever it wants which is to be found there for there competition brings it down to the minimum value.
Thomas Jefferson
Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.
Thomas Jefferson
Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.
Thomas Jefferson
Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.
Thomas Jefferson
I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.
Thomas Jefferson
Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.
Thomas Jefferson
What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.
Thomas Jefferson
Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.
Thomas Jefferson
A professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution [the University of Virginia]
Thomas Jefferson
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson
