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Our wish is that...[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.

Thomas Jefferson

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Thomas Jefferson
Age: 83 †
Born: 1743
Born: April 2
Died: 1826
Died: July 4
3Rd U.S. President
Archaeologist
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Diplomat
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President Jefferson
T. Jefferson
Results
State
Wish
Unequal
Father
Maintained
States
Fathers
Every
Property
Men
Equal
Industry

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When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.
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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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The ocean ... like the air, is the common birth-right of mankind.
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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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Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.
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The construction applied . . . to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power . . . ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers, nor a part to be so taken as to destroy the whole residue of that instrument.
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Nothing betrays imbecility so much as the being insensible of it.
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Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
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Never spend your money before you have earned it.
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I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things but they would have been done by others some of them, perhaps, a little better.
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My principle is to do whatever is right, and leave consequences to him who has the disposal of them.
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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.
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He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.
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Bind them down by the chains of the Constitution where they can do no mischief.
Thomas Jefferson
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While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
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The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.
Thomas Jefferson
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I am entirely persuaded that the agitations of the public mind advance its powers, and that at every vibration between the points of liberty and despotism, something will be gained for the former. As men become better informed, their rulers must respect them the more.
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[States and the Federal government are] coordinate departments of one simple and integral whole... The one is the domestic, the other the foreign branch of the same government.
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music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui.
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If the book be false in its facts, disprove them if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.
Thomas Jefferson