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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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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
Common
Fear
Sense
Play
Things
Never
Fairs
Fair
Wrong

More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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The doctrines of Jesus are simple and tend all to the happiness of man, that there is only one God and God is perfect. That God and man are one. That to love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself, is the sum of religion. These are the great points on which I endeavor to reform and live my life.
Thomas Jefferson
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...let us save what remains not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
Thomas Jefferson
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No man has greater confidence than I have in the spirit of the people, to a rational extent. Whatever they can, they will.
Thomas Jefferson
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If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.
Thomas Jefferson
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I have been happy . . . in believing that . . . whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never give up our Union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators.
Thomas Jefferson
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When the heart is right, the feet are swift.
Thomas Jefferson
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From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
Thomas Jefferson
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Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
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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I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid and I find myself much the happier.
Thomas Jefferson
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All we can do is to make the best of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way what is bad.
Thomas Jefferson
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In our Richmond there is much fanaticism, but chiefly among the women. They have their night meetings and prayer parties, where, attended by their priests, and sometimes by a hen-pecked husband, they pour forth the effusions of their love to Jesus, in terms as amatory and carnal, as their modesty would permit them to use a mere earthly lover.
Thomas Jefferson
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The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.
Thomas Jefferson
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Female education ... has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters ... I thought it essential to give them a solid education which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be.
Thomas Jefferson
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If [God] has made it a law in the nature of man to pursue his own happiness, He has left him free in the choice of place as well as mode, and we may safely call on the whole body of English jurists to produce the map on which nature has traced for each individual the geographical line which she forbids him to cross in pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
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One man with courage is a majority.
Thomas Jefferson
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Principle will, in... most... cases open the way for us to correct conclusion.
Thomas Jefferson
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If you have any duty which must be done, and it seems disagreeable, do it promptly and have it over.
Thomas Jefferson
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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
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Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.
Thomas Jefferson