Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jeffersonwas an American Founding Father who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. He was elected the second Vice President of the United States, serving under John Adams and in 1800 was elected the third President. Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, which motivated American colonists to break from Great Britain and form a new nation. He produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national level...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionUS President
Date of Birth13 April 1743
CityShadwell, VA
CountryUnited States of America
I believe that justice is instinct and innate; the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as the threat of feeling, seeing and hearing.
It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
My views and feelings are in favor of the abolition of war--and I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair.
A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society
State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.
Health is the requisite after morality
Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.
Nature [has] implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.
Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.
With nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.
Self-love . . . is the sole antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.
Money, not morality, constitutes the principle of commercial nations.
Honesty and interest are as intimately connected in the public as in the private code of morality.
The interests of a nation, when well understood, will be found to coincide with their moral duties.