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The law for religious freedom... [has]put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind.

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
Freedom
Mind
Restored
Clergy
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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.
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The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
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What has been the effect of [religious] coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.
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The same political parties which now agitiate the US have existed through all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.
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The federal government is our servant, not our master.
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No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.
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Men fight for freedom then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
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No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.
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So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.
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We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
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Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.
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What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.
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The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife.
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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.
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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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Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.
Thomas Jefferson
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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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The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.
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The juries are our judges of all fact, and of law when they choose it.
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A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods.
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