Quotes About Jefferson

It was necessary to invent history in order to invent the future. The sense of necessity in Cromwell and Lenin (and even in Jefferson) springs from an obsession with time, change, an obsession with cause and effect that starts to make the effect seem like the cause of its own cause. The future is the cause of the past, and we play antiquarian games to reassure ourselves that the past is past and different so that we can believe that the future will be different too.

It would not be for the public good to have [a majority in Congress of one party] greater [than] two to one.

More than any other figure in our history [Tomas] Jefferson is responsible for the idea of American exceptionalism.

If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.

All Americans mourn the passing of the author of the Declaration of Independence, George Jefferson.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Vir

If we {Federalists] must have an enemy at the head of government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures. Under Adams as under Jefferson , the government shall sink. The party in the hands of whose chief it shall sink will sink with it—and the advantage will be all on the side of his adversaries.

The first example is that of Virginia, a State which, as we have seen, has expressly declared in its constitution, that the three great departments ought not to be intermixed. The authority in support of it is Mr. Jefferson, who, besides his other advantages for remarking the operation of the government, was himself the chief magistrate of it.

If you're going to come to D.C. and it's your first time here, see the view from the bottom of the Washington Monument, looking out over the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln. And see the Jefferson Memorial. It's so beautiful and such a part of the history of the city.

Washington, not Jefferson, freed his slaves upon his death.

People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done. (Don't send hate letters, please!)

When Thomas Jefferson sat on the steps of the White House and, with a pair of scissors, began to cut out all portions of the Bible that he felt were mythic nonsense, he was expressing a rational point of view.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

But not for Jefferson. "I view cities as pestilent to the morals, the health, and the liberation of man

A specifically rural-sounding blues style did not reach a mass audience until 1926, with the first recordings of a blind Texas street singer named Lemon Jefferson.

And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery would be permanently illegal there.

He may have been young, but he was from Jefferson. He had already learned that, many times, sexual predators were also quite clumsy,

The constitutional freedom of religion is the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights

The phrase 'separation of church and state,' which appears in no founding document (only in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson), means that America must never have a state religion, not that the state be indifferent to religion.

We know Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as politicians, but they felt that science was something everyone should have a knowledge of.

Under the Confederate Constitution, on the contrary, the African slave-trade was "hereby forbidden," positively and unconditionally, from the beginning.

The Framers feared and detested factions, a view famously expressed by Madison in Federalist No. 10.31 Probably no statement has been so often cited to explain and justify the checks against popular majorities that the Framers attempted to build into the constitution. It is supremely ironic, therefore, that more than anyone except Jefferson, it was Madison who helped to create the Republican Party in order to defeat the Federalists.