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Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

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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A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
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Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand.
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The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.
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Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
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To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
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Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.
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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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A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good-humor, will go far toward securing to you the estimation of the world.
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Action will delineate and define you.
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I have been happy . . . in believing that . . . whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never give up our Union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators.
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Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.
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Would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.
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From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
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Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.
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We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
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No country and no people can be free and ignorant at the same time.
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I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
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Force cannot give right.
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Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.
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His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin
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