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If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?

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
People
Bliss
Ignorance
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Knowledge
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Blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.
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the field of knolege is the common property of all mankind
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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.
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It would not be for the public good to have [a majority in Congress of one party] greater [than] two to one.
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We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
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When a uniform exercise of kindness to prisoners on our part has been returned by as uniform severity on the part of our enemies,you must excuse me for saying it is high time, by other lessons, to teach respect to the dictates of humanity in such a case, retaliation becomes an act of benevolence.
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An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State.
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He alone who walks strict and upright, and who, in matters of opinion, will be contented that others should be as free as himself and acquiesce when his opinion is freely overruled, will attain his object in the end.
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The Declaration of Independence . . . [is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man.
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Those characters wherein fear predominates over hope may apprehend too much from...instances of irregularity. They may conclude too hastily that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government than that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth nor experience.
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Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.
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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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Peace, that glorious moment in time when everyone stops and reloads.
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Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.
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He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.
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The concentrating of powers in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
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The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us.
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I have sworn upon the altar of god.
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