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Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.

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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We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest.
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I join you therefore in branding as cowardly the idea that the human mind is incapable of further advances.
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For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.
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In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui [boredom] is, or if we are ever driven to the miserable resource of gaming, which corrupts our dispositions, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.
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By nature's law, man is at peace with man till some aggression is committed, which, by the same law, authorizes one to destroy another as his enemy.
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The excellence of every government is its adaptation to the state of those to be governed by it.
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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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Agreeable society is the first essential in constituting the happiness and of course the value of our existence.
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Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.
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Every male citizen of the commonwealth, liable to taxes or to militia duty in any county, shall have a right to vote for representatives for that county to the legislature.
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The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
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It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
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Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
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From the dissensions among Sects themselves arise necessarily a right of choosing and necessity of deliberating to which we will conform. But if we choose for ourselves, we must allow others to choose also, and so reciprocally, this establishes religious liberty.
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I leave the world and its affairs to the young and energetic, and resign myself to their care, of whom I have endeavored to take care when young.
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Scenes are now to take place as will open the eyes of credulity and of insanity itself, to the dangers of a paper medium abandoned to the discretion of avarice and of swindlers.
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I see the necessity of sacrificing our opinions sometimes to the opinions of others for the sake of harmony.
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No society is so precious as that of one’s own family.
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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.
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I have sworn upon the altar of god.
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