Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.
Thomas JeffersonMORAL LAW, Evidence of.- Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him. ... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society ... their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation.
Thomas JeffersonEvery man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government. They receive it with their being from the hand of nature. Individuals exercise it by their single will; collections of men by that of their majority; for the law of the majority is the natural law of every society of men.
Thomas JeffersonThe history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpationsall of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.
Thomas JeffersonThe earth belongs to the living. No man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the use of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living. No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.
Thomas Jefferson