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Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.

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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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.
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Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.
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But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments?
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The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.
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Where the principle of difference [between political parties] is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of honest men and rogues, into which every country is divided.
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Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.
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The hole and the patch should be commensurate.
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Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.
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The general (federal) government will tend to monarchy, which will fortify itself from day to day, instead of working its own cures.
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It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
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Knowledge is power...knowled ge is safety...knowle dge is happiness.
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You have never by a word or a deed given me one moment's uneasiness on the contrary I have felt perpetual gratitude to heaven forhaving given me, in you, a source of so much pure and unmixed happiness.
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No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
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Health is value greater than studying.
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Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading.
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The same political parties which now agitiate the US have existed through all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.
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The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticism, fancies, and falsehoods.
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Knowledge indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.
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Never [enter] into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.
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The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
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