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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

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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More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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A professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution [the University of Virginia]
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the boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.
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It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one.
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Nothing can now be believed that is seen in a newspaper.
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When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
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The man who would choose security over freedom deserves neither.
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The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.
Thomas Jefferson
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Of distinction by birth or badge, [Americans] had no more idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or planets. They had heard only that there were such, and knew that they must be wrong.
Thomas Jefferson
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Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous. . . .
Thomas Jefferson
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On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
Thomas Jefferson
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It is left... to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
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I believe from what I have lately seen that we should be substantially safe were our Citizens Armed, but we have not as many Arms as we have Enemies in the State.
Thomas Jefferson
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No man has done everything he can who has done only his best.
Thomas Jefferson
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A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
Thomas Jefferson
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Shake hands with Pain, give greeting unto Grief, Those angels in disguise, and thy glad soul From height to height, from star to shining star, Shall climb and claim blest immortality.
Thomas Jefferson
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History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
Thomas Jefferson
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Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?
Thomas Jefferson
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The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.
Thomas Jefferson
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The best defense of democracy is an informed electorate.
Thomas Jefferson
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We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.
Thomas Jefferson