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I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

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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President Jefferson
T. Jefferson
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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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Establish the eternal truth that acquiescence under insult is not the way to escape war.
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Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.
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To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.
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Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic.
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Bigotry is the disease of ignorance.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier.
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Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous. . . .
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Government governed least is government governed best.
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Our attachment to no nation on earth should supplant our attachment to liberty.
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the boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.
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Dependence leads to subservience.
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Always take hold of things by the smooth handle grateful that they are not worse rather than the rough handle, bitter that they are not better.
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The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
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If a sect arises whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play and reasons and laughs it out of doors without suffering the State to be troubled with it.
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The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. And certainly they would never consent to be so used were they not deceived. To avoid this they should be instructed to a certain degree.
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Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
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The worst day in a man's life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing.
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As government grows, freedom recedes.
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