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If some period be not fixed, either by the Constitution or by practice, to the services of the First Magistrate, his office, though nominally elective, will, in fact, be for life, and that will soon degenerate into an inheritance.
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
I have sworn upon the altar of god.
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 the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.
Thomas Jefferson
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
Thomas Jefferson
It should be our endeavor to cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation, even of that which has injured us most.
Thomas Jefferson
[If a book were] very innocent, and one which might be confided to the reason of any man not likely to be much read if let alone, but if persecuted, it will be generally read. Every man in the United States will think it a duty to buy a copy, in vindication of his right to buy and to read what he pleases.
Thomas Jefferson
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
Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.
Thomas Jefferson
I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
Thomas Jefferson
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
Thomas Jefferson
I feel... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.
Thomas Jefferson
It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government.
Thomas Jefferson
The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.
Thomas Jefferson
When we consider how much climate contributes to the happiness of our condition, by the fine sensation it excites, and the productions it is the parent of, we have reason to value highly the accident of birth in such a one as that of Virginia.
Thomas Jefferson
Although our prospect is peace, our policy and purpose are to provide for defense by all those means to which our resources are competent.
Thomas Jefferson
I have come to a resolution myself as I hope every good citizen will, never again to purchase any article of foreign manufacture which can be had of American make, be the difference of price what it may.
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Thomas Jefferson
God has formed us moral agents... that we may promote the happiness of those with whom He has placed us in society, by acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacredly their rights, bodily and mental, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own.
Thomas Jefferson
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
A man's moral sense must be unusually strong if slavery does not make him a thief.
Thomas Jefferson