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American Sphinx: The Character Of Thomas Jefferson Quotes

American Sphinx: The Character Of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis

"No one should undertake yet another book on Thomas Jefferson for 'light and transient causes.'"
"The vast literature on Jefferson has a decidedly hyperbolic character, as if one had to declare one’s allegiance at the start for or against the godlike version of Jefferson."
"True enough, most biographers take the sides of their subjects. But in Jefferson’s case the sides are more sharply drawn and the choices less negotiable."
"It seems impossible to steer an honorable course between idolatry and evisceration."
"Jefferson was electromagnetic. He symbolized the most cherished and most contested values in modern American culture."
"My only defense is to cite the extensive scholarship that already exists, to reaffirm my belief that Jefferson’s story needs to fit between two covers."
"Jefferson’s much-touted contradictions and inconsistencies were quite real, to be sure, but his psychological agility, his capacity to play hide-and-seek within himself, was a protective device he developed to prevent his truly radical and highly romantic personal vision from colliding with reality."
"Jefferson had risen from the dead. Or rather the myth of Jefferson had taken on a life of its own."
"Jefferson was not like most other historical figures—dead, forgotten and nonchalantly entrusted to historians, who presumably serve as the grave keepers for those buried memories no one really cares about anymore."
"Jefferson had become the Great Sphinx of American history, the enigmatic and elusive touchstone for the most cherished convictions and contested truths in American culture."
"No real-life historical figure could ever prove a satisfactory hero because his human weaknesses would always undercut his saintly status."
"Yes, perhaps we all would be better served if Americans were allowed to select their heroes (and villains) only from fictional characters, who would therefore never disappoint us. But we won’t and can’t."
"We would be even better served if we discarded our need for heroes altogether."
"The Jefferson who emerges in the pages that follow is a flawed creature, a man who combined massive learning with extraordinary naiveté, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception, utter devotion to great principles with a highly indulged presumption that his own conduct was not answerable to them."
"He had dressed up in his own mind, such thoughts as occurred to me, in as moving language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner."
"He sang whenever he was walking or riding, sometimes when he was reading."
"If the arguments of Summary View were to be believed, they put him in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in America."
"No matter what we learn about the historical Jefferson, that real man who walked the earth between 1743 and 1826, the mythological Jefferson will survive and flourish."
"Throughout his life Jefferson was haunted by the prospects of such a paradise and eager to find it in bucolic pastoral scenes, distant Indian tribes, well-ordered gardens, local communities or new and therefore uncorrupted generations."
"The colonists are innocent bystanders being acted on by an aggressive British government."
"The real revolutionaries are not American colonists but British officials, who are just as unmitigatedly corrupt as the colonists are virtuous."
"What strikes our modern ears as hyperbolic and melodramatic both in its tone and its posture toward political authority—virtually any expression of governmental power is stigmatized—was in fact part of a venerable Whig tradition of opposition."
"Jefferson’s embrace of the Whig rhetoric and the Whig story line was utterly sincere."
"Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is attainable."
"The gravitational pull of Monticello remained a constant seduction."
"The work had to be done alone, isolated from the public debates."
"I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasure of this gay capital."
"I understand the French so imperfectly as to be uncertain whether those to whom I speak and myself mean the same thing."
"Time had also allowed him to occupy his height in more proper proportions and carry it with more natural grace."
"The experience had 'inflicted a wound on my spirit that will only be cured by the all-healing grave.'"
"To remove all legal and political barriers to individual initiative and thereby create what he called 'an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent.'"
"The moment these treaties are concluded the jurisdiction of Congress over the commerce of the states springs into existence, and that of the particular states is superseded."
"A seasoning as they call it is the lot of most strangers."
"We must not, my Friend, be the Bubbles of our own Liberal Sentiments."
"I have found him uniformly the same wise and prudent Man and Steady Patriot."
"The air is extremely damp, and the waters very unwholesome."
"The king is against a change of measures; his ministers are against it...; and the merchants and people are against it."
"They sufficiently value our commerce; but they are quite persuaded they shall enjoy it on their own terms."
"It seems to walk before us like our shadows, always appearing in reach, yet never overtaken."
"He trusted Adams’s judgment on such matters more than his own."
"The Europeans are governments of kites over pigeons."
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive."
"If the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then, or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase."
"I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive."
"If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
"God send that our country may never have a government, which it can feel."
"I have nothing to give you in return but the history of the follies of nations in their dotage."
"My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would have seen half the earth desolated."
"Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now."
"The earth belongs in usufruct to the living."
"I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident."
"This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe."
"By the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another."
"All together, these were impressive reforms that constitute a vast improvement in the condition of this nation."
"In every event, I think the present disquiet will end well."
"They feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde."
"I occupied 'the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.'"
"I had been 'duped' by Hamilton and 'made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret.'"
"Hamilton was 'a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has ... heaped its honors on his head.'"
"Unless one is prepared to make sweeping psychiatric charges against the vanguard members of the entire revolutionary generation, then psychiatric appraisals of Jefferson himself should be recognized as both misleading and unfair."
"The primary colors of his political imagination were black and white, there were no shaded hues, no middle-range way stations where his apprehensions about the oppressive effects of political power could rest more comfortably once threats to his utopian goals materialized."
"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions that nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race."
"I am so much immersed in farming and nail-making that politics are entirely banished from my mind."
"Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit of genuine virtue."
"If Jefferson had a discernible public position on slavery in the mid-1790s, it was that the subject should be allowed to retire gracefully from the field of political warfare, much as he was doing by retiring to Monticello."
"He saw himself, even more than his slaves, as the victim of history’s stubborn refusal to proceed along the path that all enlightened observers regarded as inevitable."
"We are all republicans—we are all federalists."
"By a steady pursuit of economy and peace, and by the steady establishment of republican principles, in substance and in form, to sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of it."
"The first office of this government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery."
"The moment he retires, that his successor, if a Monocrat, will be overborne by the republican sense. . . . In the meantime, patience."
"I feel a sincere wish, indeed, to see our Government brought back to its republican principles, to see that kind of government firmly fixed to which my whole life has been devoted."
"Simplicity and austerity, not equality or individualism, were the messages of his inaugural march."
"In Jefferson’s mind great historical leaps forward were almost always the product of a purging, which freed societies from the accumulated debris of the past."
"I have learned to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it."
"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
"Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship, with all nations—entangling alliances with none."
"But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all republicans—we are all federalists."
"A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them free to regulate their pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
"The changes of administration, which in every government and in every age have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed, in this happy country take place without any species of distraction, or disorder."
"I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may possibly want energy to preserve itself?"
"The art of making decisions was synonymous with the art of drafting and revising texts."
"Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to in complaisance to the purists of New England. But where by small grammatical negligences the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt."
"I consider the fortunes of our republic as depending, in an eminent degree, on the extinguishment of the public debt."
"The debt, in this sense, was a godsend because it became the budgetary tool for enforcing austerity and reducing the size of the government."
"It is difficult for us in present-day America to appreciate, for that matter to understand at all, Jefferson’s obsession with a national debt that looks so comparatively small."
"What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?"
"We are hunting out and abolishing multitudes of useless offices, striking off jobs, lopping them down silently."
"Sound principles will not justify our taxing the industry of our fellow citizens to accumulate treasure for wars to happen we know not when, and which might not perhaps happen but from the temptations offered by that treasure."
"It was the secret weapon that made the American experiment in republicanism immune to the national aging process."
"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past."
"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
"If I can keep the vessel of state as steadily on her course another four years, my earthly purposes will be accomplished, and I shall be free to enjoy my family, my farm, and my books."
"Is this life? To grind our bones to powder, and make bread of them."
"They say we lied them out of power, and openly avow they will do the same by us."
"I am in hopes you will find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. In these it will be your glory to have steadily laboured and with as much effect as any man living."
"Our machines have been now running for 70 or 80 years, and we must expect that worn as they are; here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way."
"I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 . . . is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it."
"Others may lose of their abundance, but I of my want, have lost even the half of all I had."
"This is a dangerous state of things, and the press ought to be restored to its credibility if possible."
"I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern."