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Everything is useful which contributes to fix the principles and practices of virtue.

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
Everything
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More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.
Thomas Jefferson
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It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one.
Thomas Jefferson
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I believe in both a creative and personal God, a divinely ordered universe, that man has an innate moral sense, and that Jesus was a great moral teacher, perhaps the greatest the world has witnessed.
Thomas Jefferson
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The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood.
Thomas Jefferson
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Music furnishes a delightful recreation for the hours of respite from the cares of the day, and lasts us through life.
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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I like to see the people awake and alert.
Thomas Jefferson
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Now I will avow, that I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system.
Thomas Jefferson
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Trial by jury is part of that bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
Thomas Jefferson
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A government held together by the bands of reason only, requires much compromise of opinion.
Thomas Jefferson
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[F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.
Thomas Jefferson
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An acre of the best ground for hemp, is to be selected and sewn in hemp and be kept for a permanent hemp patch.
Thomas Jefferson
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Nothing can be believed but what one sees, or has from an eye witness.
Thomas Jefferson
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I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
Thomas Jefferson
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There are two amendments only which I am anxious for: 1. A bill of rights, which it is so much the interest of all to have that I conceive it must be yielded...2. The restoring of the principle of necessary rotation, particularly to the Senate and Presidency, but most of all to the last.
Thomas Jefferson
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The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
Thomas Jefferson
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Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Thomas Jefferson
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The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.
Thomas Jefferson
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The olive tree is surely the richest gift of Heaven. I can scarcely expect bread.
Thomas Jefferson
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I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence.
Thomas Jefferson