Quotes About Jefferson

Hadn't Jefferson written, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God?" Hadn't he also written, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants?

The Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom ranked for Jefferson as one of the three achievements worthy of gracing his tombstone (the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia were the other two).

There is a lure in power. It can get into a man's blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do. This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus, its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. then we start down the road. to ruin."501

He occupied the very seat once held by Jefferson Davis, who had left the Senate to become the president of the Confederacy. (After the war Davis had been apprehended attempting to flee to Cuba, disguised in his wife's clothing.)

Both crackers and squatters—two terms that became shorthand for landless migrants—supposedly stayed just one step ahead of the "real" farmers, Jefferson's idealized, commercially oriented cultivators. They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty.

Appointed to a committee to revise Virginia's laws, Jefferson tried another tactic that aimed to shift the balance of class power in the state. He succeeded in eliminating primogeniture and entail, two legal practices that kept large amounts of land in the hands of a few powerful families. His purpose was for land to be distributed equally to all children in a family, not just vested in the eldest male.

With Notes of the State of Virginia, Jefferson definitively established himself as a founding theorist of white supremacy in America, laying out in condensed form key points of racialized thought that pro-slavery writers would consistently reaffirm and that would echo in the cant of modern day white supremacists.

But if there's an erosion at home, you know, Thomas Jefferson warned about a tyranny of an oligarchy and if we surrender our democracy to the tyranny of an oligarchy, we've made a terrible mistake.

During his first term as president, Jefferson spent $7,500—roughly $120,000 in today's currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America's first great wine connoisseur. (He might also have been America's first great wine bore. "There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines," John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in 1807. "Not very edifying.")

the third draft of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence listed as primary grievances against King George III "prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us" and, in the next sentence, "endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.

But Washington's long and faithful service stands in marked distinction from Jefferson's mere election. Washington actually served with great fidelity. We do not want to read anything into this other than what the facts tell us, and the facts are that George Washington's service as a vestryman is commensurate with the highest commitment to the Christianity proposed by the Anglican Church.

Consider Thomas Jefferson's declaration: "God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed our only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?

It is not surprising, therefore, that Thomas Jefferson and his fellow founders would have referred four times in the Declaration of Independence to a Creator God of Providence.

The general trend in America remains toward pluralism, freedom, and Jefferson's right to "the pursuit of happiness" for each person in his or her own way. We all have a responsibility to see to it that the trend continues; its opposite is the oppression, the stasis, and the homogeneity that Nazism prized.