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Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

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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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.
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Men fight for freedom then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
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Without health there is no happiness. An attention to health, then, should take the place of every other object.
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The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend to all the happiness of man.
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Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.
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We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.
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I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government), it would become the most corrupt government on the earth.
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All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
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I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
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Should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price.
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The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.
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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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Everyone has a natural right to choose that vocation in life which he thinks most likely gives him comfortable subsistence.
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no people can be both ignorant and free.
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Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
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No country and no people can be free and ignorant at the same time.
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what are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian Mathematics Natural philosophy Natural History Civil History Ethics.
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Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.
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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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Paper is poverty, it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.
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