124 Famous Quotes by Thomas Jefferson
4/13/1743 - 7/4/1826
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About Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States. At the beginning of the American Revolution, he served in the Continental Congress, representing Virginia and then served as a wartime Governor of Virginia. Just after the war ended, from mid-1784 Jefferson served as a diplomat, stationed in Paris. In May 1785, he became the United States Minister to France.
Jefferson was the first United States Secretary of State serving under President George Washington. With his close friend James Madison he organized the Democratic-Republican Party, and subsequently resigned from Washington's cabinet. Elected Vice President in 1796, when he came in second to John Adams of the Federalists, Jefferson opposed Adams and with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Elected president in what Jefferson called the Revolution of 1800, he oversaw the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory from France, and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the new west. His second term was beset with troubles at home, such as the failed treason trial of his former Vice President Aaron Burr. With escalating trouble with Britain who was challenging American neutrality and threatening shipping at sea, he tried economic warfare with his embargo laws which only damaged American trade. In 1803, President Jefferson initiated a process of Indian tribal removal and relocation to the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River, in order to open lands for eventual American settlers.
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A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Democracy
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it’s liberty and interests by the most lasting bands
Agriculture
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
Constitution
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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When any one State in the American Union refuses obedience to the Confederation by which they have bound themselves, the rest have a natural right to compel them to obedience
Obedience
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Ambition
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American education.... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long, get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of sophisticated armaments.
America and americans
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.
Aristocracy
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.
Bigotry
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.
Caring
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Civil rights
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is, that we should have nothing to do with conquest
Conquest
Quotes, by Thomas Jefferson
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