Twilight at Monticello Quotes

“A remarkably disciplined scholar, Jefferson spent money on books the way less purposeful young men spent it on whiskey or women.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“At Douglas’s school, Jefferson began to perfect his political and diplomatic skills. Seeking changes in the curriculum, but reluctant to confront the teacher directly, Jefferson sent another student in his stead. “For his temerity,” the historian John Chester Miller has written, “the hapless accomplice was roundly rebuked by the clergyman-pedagogue while Jefferson himself remained undetected and unscathed. Jefferson, one of the great managers of men, began his career as a manager of children.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“If man’s destructive impulses were implanted by Nature’s God for beneficial purposes, and war was one way in which these purposes were served, then by what rational calculation should it be opposed? And if such collective exercises in destruction as war served Nature’s purposes, why not such acts by individuals? Why not murder? These were questions that Jefferson’s philosophical system could never answer, so he wished them away. They were “metaphysical,” and as such, beyond the interest of a scientist. But even scientists are troubled when wars threaten to engulf them and their families and, in December 1811, another war seemed unavoidable.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“By now, congressmen in their nightcaps carried blankets and pillows into the chamber and slept fitfully between the balloting.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“he still took the Richmond Enquirer for the advertisements, which he considered “the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“The older he got, the more he appreciated the sublime pleasures of the life of the mind, to which he now sought to devote himself almost exclusively.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“in so many areas of life, Nature had made it agreeable for man to do what was virtuous.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“Jefferson loved order, symmetry, and balance, and there was no place on the mountaintop more orderly, symmetrical, and balanced than the garden,”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson