“Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
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Thomas Jefferson
“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is Just”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Altho' I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose Basanistos may be amusing. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro' the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.
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Thomas Jefferson
“We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
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Thomas Jefferson
