First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

At the age of sixty-nine, he was still on horseback every day, he noted, but walked little, “a single mile being too much for me.” As for politics, he said, “I think little of them, and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.”75

Thomas Jefferson.