Think on These...

Some thought provoking quotes by Thomas Jefferson on which to muse and ruminate this weekend:

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

I cannot live without books.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.(the MSM has been hokum all along)

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper. (he would have been right at home with the New Media...get a load of the next quote...heh heh)

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

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.

The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it. (you need to read this one again; you didn't get it the first time!)

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.

So many quotes, so little space! Jefferson was a veritable bumper sticker machine!