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Dependence begets subservience and paves the way for tyranny.

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
Tyranny
Way
Paves
Subservience
Begets
Dependence

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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 reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.
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I am a Christian in the only sense in which He wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to His doctrines in preference to all others.
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Taste cannot be controlled by law. We must resist at all costs any attempt to regulate our individual freedoms and to legislate our personal moralities.
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The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.
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The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.
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It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.
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It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate.
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Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.
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To take a single step beyond the text would be to take possession of a boundless field of power.
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Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
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I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government), it would become the most corrupt government on the earth.
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We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.
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War...is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.
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Knowledge indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.
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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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The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
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A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
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I may err in my measures, but never shall deflect from the intention to fortify the public liberty by every possible means, and to put it out of the power of the few to riot on the labors of the many.
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