Words of Wisdom from Thomas Jefferson

"The Earth belongs...to the living:...no man can by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied..to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the use of the lands for several generations to come, and then the land would belong to the dead and not the living...No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence,"

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison, 1789