"Our ancestors ... were laborers, not lawyers...." - Quote by Thomas Jefferson
Our ancestors ... were laborers, not lawyers.
More by Thomas Jefferson
“No other depositories of power [but the people themselves] have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge.”
“The law of self-preservation is higher than written law.”
“Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.”
More on Ancestry
“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.”
“No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.”
“I never really knew about my ancestors until this year, when I learned that the name Cobain was Irish. My parents had never bothered to find that stuff out.”
More on Labor
“Coal is not dear for the coal-miner who can use it there and then, nor is khadi dear for the villager who manufactures his own khadi.”
“In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant.”
“To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.”