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Compulsion in religion is distinguished peculiarly from compulsion in every other thing. ...I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve and abhor.

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
Compulsion
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We are not immortal ourselves, my friend how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence and we must acquiesce.
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The Giver of life gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness.
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I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gaycapital [Paris].
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Educate and inform the whole mass of the people.
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Of distinction by birth or badge, [Americans] had no more idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or planets. They had heard only that there were such, and knew that they must be wrong.
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[I]n Great-Britain it is said that their constitution relies on the house of commons for honesty, and the lords for wisdom whichwould be a rational reliance if honesty were to be bought with money, and if wisdom were hereditary.
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No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination.
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History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.
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Health is worth more than learning.
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As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may indeed injure them in fame or in fortune but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law.
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But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.
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I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries of comforts of life.
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Easter was when they nailed Him to the cross. And He never said a mumbling word.
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From candlelight to early bedtime, I read.
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No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America.
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Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.
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Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people they fix too for the people the principles of their political creed.
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When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither.
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An hereditary aristocracy... will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.
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The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.
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