Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters

to do wrong is a melancholy resource. even where retaliation renders it indispensably necessary. it is better to suffer much from the scalpings, the incensions conflagrations, the rapes and rapine of savages, than to countenance and strengthen such barbarisms by retortion. I have ever deemed it more honorable, & more profitable too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one. the good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.