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Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

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
Government
Begets
Dependence
Fit
Venality
Ambition
Subservience
Tools
Germ
Design
Prepares
Virtue
Germs
Liberty
Designs

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It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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No instance exists of a person's writing two language perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.
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Men fight for freedom then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
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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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Health is worth more than learning.
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Perfection in wisdom, as well as in integrity, is neither required nor expected in these agents (public servants). It belongs not to man. The wise know too well their weaknesses to assume infallibility and he who knows most, knows best how little he knows.
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Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.
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Defend our liberties and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindred and tongues.
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I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries of comforts of life.
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The Bible makes the best people in the world.
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A good neighbor is a very desireable thing.
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Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
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But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.
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We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.
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There are two amendments only which I am anxious for: 1. A bill of rights, which it is so much the interest of all to have that I conceive it must be yielded...2. The restoring of the principle of necessary rotation, particularly to the Senate and Presidency, but most of all to the last.
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It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.
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The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.
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To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
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Having labored faithfully in establishing the right of self-government, we see in the rising generation, into whose hands it is passing, that purity of principle and energy of character which will protect and preserve it through their day, and deliver it over to their sons as they receive it from their fathers.
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It is my disposition to maintain peace until its condition shall be made less tolerable than that of war itself.
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