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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.

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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War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
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We are not immortal ourselves, my friend how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence and we must acquiesce.
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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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The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.
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[I]n Great-Britain it is said that their constitution relies on the house of commons for honesty, and the lords for wisdom whichwould be a rational reliance if honesty were to be bought with money, and if wisdom were hereditary.
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In a government bottomed on the will of all, the... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.
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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!
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I feel... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.
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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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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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music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui.
Thomas Jefferson
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A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful Land, traversing all the seas with the rich production of their Industry.
Thomas Jefferson
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But of all the views of this law [universal education] none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.
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In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.
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When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state
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The contest is not between us and them, but between good and evil, and if those who would fight evil adopt the ways of evil, evil wins.
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God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion.
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The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.
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A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man.
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France, freed from that monster, Bonaparte, must again become the most agreeable country on earth. It would be the second choice of all whose ties of family and fortune give a preference to some other one, and the first choice of all not under those ties.
Thomas Jefferson