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If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

Thomas Jefferson

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Thomas Jefferson
Age: 83 †
Born: 1743
Born: April 2
Died: 1826
Died: July 4
3Rd U.S. President
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Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.
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Hindsight is an exact science. Hold fast to your dreams, for it dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.
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Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.
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The idea of creating a national bank I do not concur in, because it seems now decided that Congress has not that power (although I sincerely wish they had it exclusively), and because I think there is already a vast redundancy rather than a scarcity of paper medium.
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Error is to be pitied and pardoned: it is the weakness of human nature. But vice is a foul blemish, not pardonable in any character.
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Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.
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A cold-blooded, calculation, unprincipled, usurper, without a virtue, no statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil government, and supplying ignorance by bold presumption.
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May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.
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Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.
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What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
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Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
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Do not neglect your music. It will be a companion which will sweeten many hours of life to you.
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Congress has scarcely any thing to employ them, and complain that the place [Washington, D.C.] is remarkably dull.
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I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another.
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The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
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Having always observed that public works are much less advantageously managed than the same are by private hands, I have thought it better for the public to go to market for whatever it wants which is to be found there for there competition brings it down to the minimum value.
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Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
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I have no ambition to govern men it is a painful and thankless office.
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I hope that we have not labored in vain, and that our experiment will still prove that men can be governed by reason.
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With earnest prayers to all my friends to cherish mutual good will, to promote harmony and conciliation, and above all things to let the love of our country soar above all minor passions, I tender you the assurance of my affectionate esteem and respect.
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