Thomas Jefferson Quotes About Intellectual Property

• He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Freedom, Ideas, Light

  Letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813

• If NATURE has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea... No one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Creativity, Thinking, Light

  Letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813

• That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Freedom, Moving, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (1900). “The Life and Writings of ...”

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