American Sphinx Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans—we are all federalists.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. He was, however, an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary. The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable. The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came here, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had on my own mind. . . . I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it. And it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself. —JEFFERSON TO MARIA JEFFERSON EPPES
MARCH 3, 1802”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“He also showed himself extremely sensitive to any criticism of his prose.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Like the Saxon myth, this way of thinking and talking about politics had deep roots in the Whig tradition in England, dating back to the Puritan dissenters during the English Civil War in the 1640s.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“to deprive unsuspecting colonists of their liberties. Like the Saxon myth, this way of thinking and talking about politics had deep roots in the Whig tradition in England, dating back to the Puritan dissenters during the English Civil War in the 1640s.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“The story became a clash between British tyranny and colonial liberty, scheming British officials and supplicating colonists, all culminating in the clash at Lexington and Concord between General Thomas Gage’s “ministerial army” and “the unsuspecting inhabitants” of Massachusetts. All this was conveyed in what we might call the sentimental style of the innocent victim.33 It is impossible to know how much of this cartoonlike version of the imperial crisis Jefferson actually believed and how much was a stylistic affectation.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“The explanation lies buried in the inner folds of Jefferson’s personality, beyond the reach of traditional historical methods and canons of evidence. What we can discern is a reclusive pattern of behavior with distinctive psychological implications. The youthful Jefferson had already shown himself to be an extremely private temperament. Monticello offers the most graphic illustration of Jefferson’s need to withdraw from the rest of the world, filled as it was with human conflicts and coercions, and create a refuge where the perfect Palladian architecture established the ideal environment for his vision of domestic harmony.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“There may be people to whose tempers and dispositions Contention may be pleasing,” he wrote to John Randolph in 1775, “but to me it is of all states, but one, the most horrid.” He much preferred “to withdraw myself totally from the public stage and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquillity, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.” The most astute student of Jefferson’s lifelong compulsion to make and then remake Monticello into a perfect palace and a “magical mystery tour of architectural legerdemain” has concluded that Jefferson’s obsessive “putting up and pulling down” are best understood as a form of “childhood play adapted to an adult world.” Both the expectations that Jefferson harbored for his private life in his mansion on the mountain, as well as his way of trying to design and construct it, suggested a level of indulged sentimentality that one normally associates with an adolescent.21”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“He sang whenever he was walking or riding, sometimes when he was reading. His former slave Isaac reported that one could “hardly see him anywhar outdoors, but that he was a-singin’.” Bacon confirmed that “when he was not talking he was nearly always humming some tune, or singing in a low voice to himself.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“There he gained a reputation among his classmates as an obsessive student, sometimes spending fifteen hours with his books, three hours practicing his violin and the remaining six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious young man.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
—JEFFERSON TO JOHN ADAMS
AUGUST 1, 1816”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Almost every other American statesman might be described in a parenthesis,” Adams observed. “A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception . . . , but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transcendent shadows.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Not only was he a thoroughly marginal player within Virginia’s cast of stars, he lacked precisely those qualities that the members of Congress considered most essential. His most glaring deficiency was the talent most valued in Philadelphia: He could not speak in public.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“I verily beleive [sic] Page that I shall die soon, and yet I can give no other reason for it but that I am tired with living. At this moment when I am writing I am scarcely sensible that I exist.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Actually, these are not quite the words Jefferson composed in June 1776. Before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, Jefferson’s early draft made it even clearer that his intention was to express a spiritual vision: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.” These”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“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

“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

“ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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