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the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

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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The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
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When the people are afraid of the government, that's tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that's liberty.
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If I had to choose between government and a free press, I would choose a free press.
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The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible.
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History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume and knowing it, to defeat its views.
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Honesty and interest are as intimately connected in the public as in the private code of morality.
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What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
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He who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me.
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The precepts of philosophy and of the Hebrew code, laid hold of actions only. (Jesus) pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man, erected his tribunal in the regions of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.
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In our early struggles for liberty, religious freedom could not fail to become a primary object.
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The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
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It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
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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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Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men.
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Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under protection of habeas corpus and trial by juries impartially selected, these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
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Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.
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I do not believe war the most certain means of enforcing principles. Those peaceable coercions which are in the power of every nation, if undertaken in concert and in time of peace, are more likely to produce the desired effect.
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The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.
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A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man.
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I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.
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