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I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. I wrote this in 1800, in the midst of a presidential campaign against John Adams, whose Federalists had passed the Alien and Sedition Acts — laws that criminalised criticism of the government. The battle then was not new; it was the battle that every generation must fight: the battle of open inquiry against the authority that fears what open inquiry might find.