Quote:

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Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

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Always fun to read quotes from the Founding Fathers posted by people who are reading them for the first time!

I suppose, virtuous agrarians that we all still are, or Republicans anyway, we can overlook the obvious NON-subservient venality, equally obvious suffocated germs of virtue and the unbridled ambitions of.........Wall Street, much of corporate America and....you get the drift.

That said. I've always admired Jefferson for planting the seeds of the idea for the 'wall of separation' between church and state that wannabe theocrats in the GOP vigorously deny that Jefferson ever said, or meant.

Quote:

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Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

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http://www.usconstitution.net/jeffwall.html