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Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

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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Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can always be pretended.
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Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
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While old men feel sensibly enough their own advance in years, they do not sufficiently recollect it in those whom they have seenyoung.
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And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
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the qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. they are the result of habit and long training.
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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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We abhor the follies of war, and are not untried in its distresses and calamities. Unmeddling with the affairs of other nations, we had hoped that our distance and our dispositions would have left us free, in the example and indulgence of peace with all the world.
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I rejoice when I hear of young men of virtue and talents, worthy to receive and likely to preserve the splendid inheritance of self- government, which we have acquired and shaped for them.
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Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable for, not the rightness, but the uprightness of the decision
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Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.
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[All religious sects] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies in which they live.
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A properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate.
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Easter was when they nailed Him to the cross. And He never said a mumbling word.
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Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its happiness.
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I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
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While the principles of our Constitution give just latitude to inquiry, every citizen faithful to it will deem embodied expressions of discontent and open outrages of law and patriotism as dishonorable as they are injurious
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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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No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness.
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The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated.
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