Quotes About Jefferson

Consider, for example, Jefferson's essay, penned in 1764 at the age of twenty-one, on the question, "Whether Christianity is part of the Common Law?"63 His answer was confident and unequivocal: "We may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.

It was Jefferson, not some liberal judge in the sixties, who called for a wall between church and state—and if we have declined to heed Jefferson's advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it's only because the Constitution itself proved a sufficient defense against tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and and keeps people independent from domineering centralized powers. In Jefferson's time, [George] was the king. In ours, it's multinational corporations.

True, (Jefferson's) rational religion ran in rivulets outside the American mainstream, but heterodoxy is faith of a different form and, like orthodoxy, should be recognized for what it is: a way of being religious.

The solution to your Jefferson cipher should be loading on my laptop as we speak. Our guys solved it." Had he heard right? The key? Found? After 175 years? Parrott was right—the captains would be thrilled. But there was still the matter of the foolishness that had just occurred. He could only hope he'd covered their tracks with no mistakes. If not, no cipher key would matter.

It was Jefferson who warned that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." There

I love the example of Jefferson because he's willing to murder his government and then he becomes a president and then his face is in a mountain. Just because he exercised his power.

Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.

God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Thomas Jefferson Day, the anniversary of the third president's birth.

engraved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington: "God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?

In this routine, the introverted Jefferson manages his emotions.

When Jefferson and the Republicans rallied to the Union and to the existing Federalist organization, the fabric of traditional American democracy was almost completely woven.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education.

Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.

here a short time, and then started for Jefferson Barracks, in a steam

Jefferson believed full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man, that it was not something given lightly nor to be taken lightly. A man couldn't vote simply because he was a man, in Jefferson's eyes. He had to be a responsible man. A vote was, to Jefferson, a precious privilege a man attained for himself in a—a live-and-let-live economy.

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.

We Americans think, in every country in transition, there's a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune.

What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.

The variety of opinions leads to questions. Questions lead to truth.

Negotiating with a representative of the Libyan pirates in 1786, Thomas Jefferson was told that the Quran commanded the destruction of all nonbelievers, Americans included. And yet, when President Thomas Jefferson later made war on Libya, he dreamed of transforming it into a democracy.