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American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson QUOTES

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson QUOTES

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

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

2 " 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 and thereby allowed the previously obstructed natural forces to flow forward into the future. Simplicity and austerity, not equality or individualism, were the messages of his inaugural march. It was a minimalist statement about a purging of excess and a recovery of essence. "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

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

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

4 " How the right hand became disabled would be a long story for the left to tell,” he wrote to William Stephens Smith. “It was by one of those follies from which good cannot come, but ill may. "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

5 " When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both. Neither man ever forgot the insult or the friend standing next to him when it happened. "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

6 " In his first year as president he received 1,881 letters, not including internal correspondence from his cabinet, and sent out 677 letters of his own. This "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

7 " I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever. . . . Such an addiction is the last degredation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

8 " The virtual extinction of the French expeditionary force, which had been scheduled to proceed to New Orleans after dispatching the blacks of Santo Domingo, was the immediate cause of Napoleon's decision to cut his losses in the Western Hemisphere. In that sense, Jefferson was not only extraordinarily lucky but also beholden to historical forces that he had actually opposed. "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

9 " ever observed that a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom” and that the "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

10 " censures "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

11 " The emergence of an early form of democratic politics had not yet reached that stage of development. It was still considered unbecoming for a serious statesman to prostitute his integrity by a direct appeal to voters.79 "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

12 " ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever. "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

13 " You could look back and, with the advantage of hindsight, locate the moment when the tide began to turn in the 1960s. In 1963 Leonard Levy published Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, which, as its title announced, found Jefferson’s record as a liberal defender "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

14 " But the experience took its toll on Jefferson’s view of the American press. His eloquent statement in the Inaugural Address—“let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it”—implied that complete freedom of the press was both inviolable and self-correcting. Now he was not so sure. “Our newspapers, for the most part, present only the charicatures of disaffected minds,” he concluded in 1803, and what he called “the abuses of the freedom of the press” had generated a scatological political culture “never before known or borne by any civilized nation.” Jefferson actually had a point, since his presidency coincided with an exponential increase in the sheer number of American newspapers, as well as the abiding sense—left over from the 1790s—that there were no official or unofficial rules of conduct governing what would or should be printed.91 "

― Joseph J. Ellis , American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson