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To take a single step beyond the boundaries specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to definition.

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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More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

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[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.
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The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor I.
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Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its happiness.
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The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.
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Revenue on the consumption of foreign articles is paid cheerfully by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts.
Thomas Jefferson
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Motherhood is the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness.
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The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.
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The contest is not between us and them, but between good and evil, and if those who would fight evil adopt the ways of evil, evil wins.
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Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us.
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One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.
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In a virtuous and free state, no rewards can be so pleasing to sensible minds, as those which include the approbation of our fellow citizens. My great pain is, lest my poor endeavours should fall short of the kind expectations of my country.
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Wine brightens the life and thinking of anyone
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Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.
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His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin
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The great cause which divides our countries is not to be decided by individual animosities. The harmony of private societies cannot weaken national efforts.
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Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.
Thomas Jefferson
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The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.
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Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.
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What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?
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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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