whence it becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or accidental condition of circumstance. Thomas Jefferson to Dupont de Nemours, 1816 What is this This project is designed to promote self-guided access to historical information that is rich, relevant, reliable, and freely-available on the Internet. Curiously, the variant of this quotation almost exclusively attributed to Jefferson is 'all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.' Other variants are not attributed to Jefferson at all, but typically to Edmund Burke and others. “Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large. Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they. Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
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