"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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Thomas Jefferson quotes (page 7 of 91)
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"No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence."
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"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither."
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"In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal."
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"When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
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"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude."
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"A properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate."
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"Paper money is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted."
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"Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support."
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"I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man."
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"The example of changing a constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had give them. The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberation, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men."
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"Every gentleman plays billiards, but someone who plays billiards too well, is no gentleman."
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"The worst day in a man's life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing."
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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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"May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion."
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"My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there."
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"But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have been called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."
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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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"The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife."
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"Let the eye of vigilance never be closed."
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