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War is not the best engine for us to resort to nature has given us one in our commerce, which if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.

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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We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
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Question with boldness even the existence of a God because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
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The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.
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The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.
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The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible.
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God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion.
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The only true corrective of Constitutional abuses is education.
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The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.
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The genuine and simple religion of Jesus will one day be restored: such as it was preached and practiced by Himself.
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A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one.
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The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.
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It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
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I have ever deemed it more honorable and more profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.
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.
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I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
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Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
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The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated.
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The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.
Thomas Jefferson
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The ocean ... like the air, is the common birth-right of mankind.
Thomas Jefferson
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Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.
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