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I have ever deemed it more honorable and more profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.

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
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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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When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state
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Don't spend your money till you have it.
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It is my disposition to maintain peace until its condition shall be made less tolerable than that of war itself.
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Religions are all the same...Based upon legends and fantasies
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There is no justification for taking away individuals' freedom in the guise of public safety.
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A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.
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The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
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Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. ... With hearts fortified ... we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare that... we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverence, employ for the preservation of our liberties being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live slaves.
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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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I served with General Washington in die Legislature of Virginia...and...with Doctor Franklin in Congress. I never heard neither of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.
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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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I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.
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Laws abridging the natural right of the citizen should be restrained by rigorous constructions within their narrowest limits.
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The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
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The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.
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If science produces no better fruits than tyranny... I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable as our neighbouring savages are.
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Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
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I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.
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No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.
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