Jefferson

He wrote:

...all men are created equal and independent ...from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry...

... liberty is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe. At least the enlightened part of it, for light and liberty go together. It is our glory that we first put it into motion, and our happiness that, being foremost, we had no bad examples to follow.

The framers of our Constitution certainly supposed they had guarded as well their Government against destruction by treason as their citizens against oppression under pretense of it...

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none.

...the human heart knows no joy which I have not lost, no sorrow of which I have not drunk! Fortune can present no grief of unknown form to me. Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself?

Were his thoughts and opinions not enough, there is Monticello...

times/places

Born 1743, Shadwell, Virginia.
Died 1826, Monticello, Virginia.

Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. (1987) In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson.
Dumas Malone, (1981) Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello.
Milton Meltzer, (1991) Thomas Jefferson: The Revolutionary Aristrocat.
Jefferson Memorial web site.