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Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.

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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President Jefferson
T. Jefferson
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Proportion
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People

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The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exlusions, and incapacitations are removed.
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We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church.
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When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles every other correction is either useless or a new evil.
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While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil.
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Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
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An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second.
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[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.
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I prefer to be remembered for what I have done for others, not what others have done for me.
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The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes, and they believe rightly.
Thomas Jefferson
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Man is not made for the State but the State for man and it derives its just powers only from the consent of the governed.
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Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself.
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History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume and knowing it, to defeat its views.
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I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
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Without books, I would certainly die.
Thomas Jefferson
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Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
Thomas Jefferson
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One man with courage is a majority.
Thomas Jefferson
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In reviewing the history of the times through which we have passed, no portion of it gives greater satisfaction or reflection, than that which represents the efforts of the friends of religious freedom and the success with which they are crowned.
Thomas Jefferson
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The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom.
Thomas Jefferson
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We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.
Thomas Jefferson
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We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest.
Thomas Jefferson