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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.
Thomas Jefferson
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Every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact (casus non faederis) to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits. Without this right, they would be under the dominion, absolute and unlimited, of whosoever might exercise this right of judgment for them.
Thomas Jefferson
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We are sensible of the duty and expediency of submitting our opinions to the will of the majority, and can wait with patience till they get right if they happen to be at any time wrong.
Thomas Jefferson
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To draw around the whole nation the strength of the General Government
as a barrier against foreign foes... is [one of the] functions of the General Government on which [our citizens] have a right to call.
Thomas Jefferson
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If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.
Thomas Jefferson
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Let common sense and common honesty have fair play, and they will soon set things to rights.
Thomas Jefferson
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Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
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With those who wish to think amiss of me, I have learnt to be perfectly indifferent: but where I know a mind to be ingenuous, andto need only truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive.
Thomas Jefferson
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Every nation has a right to govern itself internally under what forms it pleases, and to change these forms at its own will.
Thomas Jefferson
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There are two amendments only which I am anxious for: 1. A bill of rights, which it is so much the interest of all to have that I conceive it must be yielded...2. The restoring of the principle of necessary rotation, particularly to the Senate and Presidency, but most of all to the last...
Thomas Jefferson
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I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away.
Thomas Jefferson
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That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression; and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights, and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator
Thomas Jefferson
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My principle is to do whatever is right, and leave consequences to him who has the disposal of them.
Thomas Jefferson
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Perhaps it will be found that to obtain a just republic (and it is to secure our just rights that we resort to government at all) it must be so extensive as that local egoisms may never reach its greater part; that on every particular question, a majority may be found in its councils free from particular interests, and giving, therefore, an uniform prevalence to the principles of justice.
Thomas Jefferson
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I will now add what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of nations.
Thomas Jefferson
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I do most anxiously wish to see the highest degrees of education given to the higher degrees of genius and to all degrees of it, so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world and to keep their part of it going on right; for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.
Thomas Jefferson
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Our ancestors... possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them.
Thomas Jefferson
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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Thomas Jefferson
Creative Commons
Born:
April 13, 1743
Died:
July 4, 1826
(aged 83)
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