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It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

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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More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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Neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven.
Thomas Jefferson
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No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence.
Thomas Jefferson
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The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.
Thomas Jefferson
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What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.
Thomas Jefferson
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I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.
Thomas Jefferson
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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.
Thomas Jefferson
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He who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me.
Thomas Jefferson
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Stock dealers and banking companies, by the aid of a paper system, are enriching themselves to the ruin of our country, and swaying the government by their possession of the printing presses, which their wealth commands and by any other means, not always honorable to the character of our countrymen.
Thomas Jefferson
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A lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.
Thomas Jefferson
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The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes, and they believe rightly.
Thomas Jefferson
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The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!
Thomas Jefferson
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It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.
Thomas Jefferson
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I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
Thomas Jefferson
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No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.
Thomas Jefferson
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To seek out the best [persons to serve in the government] though the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with ther purest motives, is something incorrect....No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.
Thomas Jefferson
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Laws abridging the natural right of the citizen should be restrained by rigorous constructions within their narrowest limits.
Thomas Jefferson
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I value peace, and I should unwillingly see any event take place which would render war a necessary resource.
Thomas Jefferson
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It is every Americans' right and obligation to read and interpret the Constitution for himself.
Thomas Jefferson
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...let us save what remains not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
Thomas Jefferson
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It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united.
Thomas Jefferson