But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over.
This is our moment...while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.
The biggest threat, when it comes to climate change and pollution, isn't going to come from us because we only have 300 million people. It's going to come from China with over 1 billion people and India with over 1 billion people.
As a younger actor coming up, I wanted to be in films. There's something special about being on film sets; there's an excitement; the people in every department are passionate about what they do.
You cannot love a car the way you love a horse. The horse brings out human feelings the way machines cannot do. Things like machines may develop or neglect certain things in people ... Machines make our life impersonal and stultify certain elements in us and create an impersonal environment.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.
We have to adopt a wider perspective, and always find common things between the people of north, east, south, and west. Conflict comes from the basis of differencs.
I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken that by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.
We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal ... that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
We say we are trying to buy into businesses with excellent economics, run by honest and able people at a decent price. We buy very few securities, so we look at it as "focused" investing.