Thomas Jefferson Quotes

“Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Broadly put, philosophers think: politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“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.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“As much as Jefferson loved France residence abroad gave him greater appreciation for his own nation. He was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home. Moving between two worlds, translating the best of the old into the new and explaining the benefits of the new to the old, he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Leadership meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power – until he bore executive responsibility.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, 'Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned?' The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. 'Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“For Jefferson, politics was not a dispiriting distraction but an undertaking that made everything else possible.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.2 —PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, at a dinner in honor of all living recipients of the Nobel Prize, 1962”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible account with the ideal and the principled.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of like-minded, and savoring teachers who seemed to be ambassadors from other, richer, writer worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg "the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.2 —American motto suggested”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention.1 Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. —THOMAS JEFFERSON”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“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.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Madison described the state of play well in May 1798: “The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views.…22 Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.” Extreme measures”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch’d with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“At a quarter to twelve on that Friday, Patty Jefferson died. In the final moments, Jefferson’s sister Martha Carr had to help the grieving husband from his wife’s bedside.13 He was, his daughter recalled, “in a state of insensibility” when Mrs. Carr “with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted”—and not for a brief moment. Jefferson “remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive.” When he did come to, he was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control in the calamity of Patty’s death. According to his daughter Patsy, “The scene that followed I did not witness”—presumably “the scene” unfolded in the library when he revived—“but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself.”14 (Patsy was writing half a century later.) A”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Jefferson sensed that, as with lovers and intimate friends, there can often be no middle ground between engagement and estrangement. In the presence of passion, or of former passions, acquaintance is impossible. It is all or nothing, for once affections have cooled it is very difficult to bring them back to a middling temperature. In such cases human nature tends to rekindle the flames to their old force, or consign them to perpetual chill.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Jefferson believed in the future, and why not? His own lifetime was testament to the possibility of political and intellectual progress. The past, he thought, should hold no magical, unexamined claim over the present. “Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” he wrote in 1816.40 They”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“THOMAS JEFFERSON LEFT POSTERITY an immense correspondence, and I am particularly indebted to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, published by Princeton University Press and first edited by Julian P. Boyd. I am, moreover, grateful to the incumbent editors of the Papers, especially general editor Barbara B. Oberg, for sharing unpublished transcripts of letters gathered for future volumes. The goal of the Princeton edition was, and continues to be, “to present as accurate a text as possible and to preserve as many of Jefferson’s distinctive mannerisms of writing as can be done.” To provide clarity and readability for a modern audience, however, I have taken the liberty of regularizing much of the quoted language from Jefferson and from his contemporaries. I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson’s frequent use of “it’s” for “its” and “recieve” for “receive,” and have, in most cases, expanded contractions and abbreviations and followed generally accepted practices of capitalization.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“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”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“A politician’s task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power