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“I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes,” he once wrote to one of his daughters.59
Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think.
Everyone wants to believe that what they have to say is fascinating, illuminating, and possibly even epochal. The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: “one of the choice ones of the earth.”69
“Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.” The line means “Carry on, and preserve yourselves for better times.”
Jefferson understood a timeless truth: that politics is kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting, and the morning’s foe may well be the afternoon’s friend.
John Quincy Adams was right when he told his diary that political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. “The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense,” Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term.12
