Legislators invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that laws regarding property should align with human emotions and relationships.
Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the importance of ensuring that legislation regarding property ownership does not conflict with the innate emotional attachments and relationships people have. He argues that lawmakers should consider the natural affections of individuals while creating laws, as arbitrary subdivisions of property can disrupt social bonds and community cohesion.
In practice
In a discussion about zoning laws at a town hall meeting, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of community ties in property legislation.
The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared
βWe must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.
A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
But if the Vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet;for such things are of Spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.
Where there is no style, there is no slave. Martial Arts mean honestly expressing yourself. No style. No slave.
Which government is the best? The one that teaches us to govern ourselves.
Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
It isn't those who are taken by force, put in chains, and sold as slaves who are the real slaves; it is those who will accept it, morally and physically.
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