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Common sense is the foundation of all authorities, of the laws themselves, and of their construction.

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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Do not neglect your music. It will be a companion which will sweeten many hours of life to you.
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Excessive taxation . . . will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.
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music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui.
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The truth is, that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in His genuine words.
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The declaration of rights [Bill of Rights] is, like all other human blessings, alloyed with some inconveniences and not accomplishing fully its object. But the good in this instance vastly outweighs the evil.
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If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi... in war, they will kill some of us we shall destroy them all.
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A man's moral sense must be unusually strong if slavery does not make him a thief.
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No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.
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Truth between candid minds can never do harm.
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Paper is poverty, it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.
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We have already given in example one effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body
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To draw around the whole nation the strength of the General Government as a barrier against foreign foes... is [one of the] functions of the General Government on which [our citizens] have a right to call.
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Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.
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The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?
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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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Trial by jury is part of that bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
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The merchant has no country .
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By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline.
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Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.
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The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.
Thomas Jefferson