Quotes About Jefferson

By midnight on May 1, 1800, the local political world learned the result of this fierce election, one that portended a fundamental realignment in American politics: the Republican slate had swept New York City, converting Hamilton's own home turf from a Federalist to a Republican stronghold. This meant that Jefferson could now count on twelve electoral votes where he had received none in 1796.

How had Hamilton justified this disgraceful action to himself? He believed that Jefferson's support for the Constitution had always been lukewarm and that, once in office, he would dismantle the federal government and return America to the chaos of the Articles of Confederation. This was not entirely paranoid thinking on Hamilton's part, for Jefferson made statements that sounded as if he wanted an annulment or radical recasting of the Constitution.

Reason the Only Oracle of Man, Ethan Allen titled his work, expressing the widespread viewpoint. "Fix reason firmly in her seat," writes Jefferson to a nephew, "and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

No part of the regular school day was set aside for religious worship…. Jefferson did not permit the room belonging to the university to be used for religious purposes.

Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.

In 1786, Jefferson pitched a secular and public system of education for Virginia. He reasoned that "the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more that the thousandth part of what will be paid to [the] kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

Jefferson dijo: Si una nación espera ser ignorante y libre, espera algo que nunca fue ni nunca será...

Attributing blacks' poor health to inherent racial difference allowed whites like Jefferson both to ignore how disease is caused by political inequality and to justify an unequal system by pointing to the inherent racial difference that disease supposedly reveals.

After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson's draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words "sacred & undeniable," and suggested that "these truths" were, instead, "self-evident." This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart.

After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson's draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words "sacred and undeniable," and suggested that "these truths" were, instead, "self-evident." This was mroe than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science.

Dependence begets subservience and venality," he wrote. There was something romantic, too, in Jefferson's attachment to farming: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." Influenced by

an embittered Jefferson would suggest that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies.)

Of course, Mississippi participates in federal matching programs for everything from preserving the post-Civil War home of Jefferson Davis to beaver control.

Now Jefferson and Madison lent their imprimatur to an outmoded theory in which the Constitution became a compact of the states, not of their citizens. By this logic, states could refrain from complying with federal legislation they considered unconstitutional.

The influence of the doctrine of states' rights, especially in the version promulgated by Jefferson, reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond. At the close of that war, James Garfield of Ohio, the future president, wrote that the Kentucky Resolutions "contained the germ of nullification and secession, and we are today reaping the fruits.

These horror stories about Hamilton have been regurgitated for two centuries and are now engraved on the memories of historians and readers alike. Unfortunately, these vignettes often cruelly misrepresent Hamilton and have done no small damage to his reputation. Jefferson understood very well the power of laying down a paper trail.

Both Jefferson and Adams detested people who earned a living shuffling financial paper, and when Adams launched a bitter tirade in later years against the iniquitous banking system, Jefferson agreed that the business was "an infinity of successive felonious larcenies." 9 That banks could serve any economic purpose—that they could generate prosperity that might enrich the few but also lubricate the wheels of commerce—seemed alien to both men.

early July 1792, it was clear that George Washington would not have the option of silence or inaction in stemming the feud between Hamilton and Jefferson. He had probably waited too long to assert control. His fine, nonpartisan stance may have only intensified the partisan mischief between his two appointees.

Nonetheless, Jefferson Davis remained loyal to him in the teeth of a clamor to cashier him.

cannot doubt, from the evidence that I possess[,] that the National Gazette was instituted by him [Jefferson] for political purposes and that one leading object of it has been to render me and all the measures connected with my department as odious as possible.

Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that "governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed.

Jefferson went still further, and he introduced a maxim into the policy of the Union, which affirms that the Americans ought never to solicit any privileges from foreign nations, in order not to be obliged to grant similar privileges themselves.