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Our ancient laws expressly declare that those who are but delegates themselves shall not delegate to others powers which require judgment and integrity in their exercise.

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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Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither.
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Were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, Does he use ardent spirits?
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Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.
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My views and feelings (are) in favor of the abolition of war-and I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war but of its abolition I despair.
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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
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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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If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi... in war, they will kill some of us we shall destroy them all.
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Female education ... has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters ... I thought it essential to give them a solid education which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be.
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the boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.
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It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.
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It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.
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Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.
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The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone.
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Free men do not ask permission to bear arms
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If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.
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The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
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Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?
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this interesting subject, which, if the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe, is to be the chief instrument in effecting it.
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It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.
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