Thomas Jefferson Quotes

“This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“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. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Within this quadrilateral of forces, Jefferson was to emerge as the republican equivalent of a philosopher king, who was coldly willing to sacrifice all principles and all allegiances to the one great aim of making America permanent.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Jefferson writes dismissively of slaves that “their griefs are transient.” American white supremacists to this day maintain that blacks are “mud people” because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—they are not capable of summoning “blood in the face,” as the”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“he amended the thought to say that men were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” thus”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Quebec.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“There is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“However, he did wish to insist that the American Indian was fully the equal, in natural and innate ability, of any European. It is probable that, like many contemplative and unsoldierly types, Jefferson was very much impressed by the physical strength and martial ardor of these native peoples. He also admired their individuality and their deep knowledge of the wilderness: two “attributes” that were denied by definition to African slaves. At moments, also (and this trope is always latent in discussions of “race”) he seemed to half-praise, and perhaps to half-envy, their sexual prowess. At any rate he maintained that if they could give up their strange idols and their primitive hunter-gatherer culture, they could readily assimilate.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“The great pseudo-scientist of the time was Georges Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon. This highly learned and industrious old fraud was considered the master of natural history and zoology, and had formed the view that North America was a wasteland condemned by nature. Its climate and soil were inhospitable to all but the scrawniest and most puny life: nothing was to be expected of it. We need waste no time on Buffon’s theories except to say that they were rivaled in quasi-religious and creationist idiocy only by the opposing school.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“There were many such in the American Revolution. Thomas Paine spent much of his career designing a new form of iron bridge to aid transportation and communication. Dr. Joseph Priestley, another man who fled royalist and Anglican persecution and who removed himself from England to Philadelphia after a “Church and King” mob had smashed his laboratory, was a chemist and physician of great renown. Benjamin Franklin would be remembered for his deductions about the practical use of electricity if he had done nothing else. Jefferson, too, considered himself a scientist. He studied botany, fossils, crop cycles, and animals. He made copious notes on what he saw. He designed a new kind of plow, which would cut a deeper furrow in soil exhausted by the false economy of tobacco farming. He was fascinated by the invention of air balloons”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Jefferson in 1778 proposed a “Bill of Proportion in Crimes and Punishments” to the Virginia House of Delegates. Beccaria, he wrote, “had satisfied the reasonable world of the unrightfulness and inefficiency of the punishment of crimes by death.” As a substitute, he put forward a scheme of hard labor on public works. The measure was rejected by one vote, though it passed in a diluted form in 1796. Even though he was too ready to accept the inhuman practice of solitary confinement, which was later to be refined from Beccaria in the penal system proposed by Jeremy Bentham, Jefferson continued to press for a distinction between murder and manslaughter, which was recast as murder in the first and second degree, and to evolve his interest in the notion of the “penitentiary” as a scientific matter, with graduated and appropriate punishments. Again, none of this careful, measured liberalism was to be extended to those of African descent.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments) published in Milan in 1764, and had copied no less than twenty-six extracts of it into his 1776 Commonplace Book. John Adams had quoted from Beccaria in his celebrated defense of the British soldiers unjustly accused during the Boston Massacre. Benjamin Franklin admired Beccaria hugely. Indeed, one of the great reproaches of the eighteenth-century radicals and liberals against the hereditary despotisms of the day was the lavish use that monarchy made of torture and of capital punishment. Beccaria’s treatise had exposed the futility and stupidity, as well as the sadism, of these practices—condemned as “cruel and unusual” in the language of the Eighth Amendment to the federal Constitution.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“The defeat of this amendment, by a substantial majority, was cited by Jefferson as “proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” Until 1776, the common-law punishment for “heresy” in Virginia had been burning.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“There was a small element of hypocrisy in Jefferson’s own position, since as a “Deist” he did not believe that God intervened in human affairs at all, and was thus in a weak position to claim divine authority for a secular bill.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greater part of the world and through all time.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“It conveys some idea of the morbid guilt and horror with which slaveholders viewed the possibility of black revenge that their most enlightened spokesman could compare his chattels with a medieval Islamic army.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“then deported. As he stated baldly when recalling the bill in his Autobiography: Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“and others always tended to assume that the errant former British and French provinces in Quebec and Ontario would eventually become part of the union.) Indeed, one of the many paradoxical consequences of the American revolution was that it helped consolidate British and royal power elsewhere in North America. Whether viewed as a continuation of the Seven Years’ or French and Indian War or not, this unsuccessful lunge to the north demonstrated that the new republic harbored continental and even imperial ambitions.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“It is possible, at one level, to read the omitted passage and to grieve at the fact that America declared its independence without repudiating its “original sin.” The stone that should have been laid at the corner was discarded by the builders, with consequences that still have the power to make the reader tremble. However, Jefferson was perhaps a little naive, as well as a little self-righteous, when he attributed the excision of the above paragraph to the influence of “Georgia and South Carolina, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“the myth of original nakedness and guilt in the Garden of Eden. Paine in his Common Sense had said, “Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.” As a compromise between government as a necessary evil—or an inevitable one—and in the course of a bill of complaint against a hereditary monarch, the Declaration proposed the idea of “the consent of the governed” and thus launched the experiment we call American, or sometimes Jeffersonian, democracy.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“it is very striking indeed that either notion should have taken precedence over property. The clear need of the hour was for inspiration (and property rights were to be restored to their customary throne when the Constitution came to be written), but “the pursuit of happiness” belongs to that limited group of lapidary phrases that has changed history, and it seems that the delegates realized this as soon as they heard it. Thomas Jefferson, indeed, is”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“exciseman Thomas Paine, was at this precise moment engaging in the discussions with fellow exiles that would lead him to publish Common Sense: the most successful pamphlet in history and one that would be the catalyst for full-hearted independence as the talisman for new-minted American pride.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Yet it could not be forgotten that America had less than five million inhabitants (nearly one-fifth of them African slaves) while France had twenty-seven million and Britain perhaps fifteen million people.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“For anyone even reasonably attuned, the air was full of Enlightenment thinking at the time, and blowing from England and Scotland as well as from France. (It was to waft Thomas Paine across the Atlantic, among other things, bearing a letter of introduction from the learned Dr. Benjamin Franklin.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America