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

“At the end, his capitulation to a slave power that he half-abominated was both self-interested and a menace to the survival of the republic. 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

“If the American Revolution, with its secularism, its separation of powers, its Bill of Rights, and its gradual enfranchisement of those excluded or worse at its founding, has often betrayed itself at home and abroad, it nevertheless remains the only revolution that still retains any power to inspire.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“He wrote that he cared not a whit whether a neighbor believed in no god or in many gods, since such a private opinion “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Jefferson had half-confronted this dilemma in his Notes on the State of Virginia, writing in a rare concession to European superiority, that American agricultural inferiority resulted “from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labor being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labor, land being abundant.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“When an instrument admits two constructions, the one safe, the other dangerous, the one precise, the other indefinite, I prefer that which is safe and precise. I had rather ask an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make our powers boundless. Our peculiar security is in possession of a written constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction …. Let us go on then perfecting it, by adding, by way of amendment to the Constitution, those powers which time and trial show are still wanting.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“And he put forward another consideration, “one which has great weight with me: the legal check which it puts into the hand of the judiciary. This is a body, which if rendered independent & kept strictly to their own department merits great confidence for their learning and integrity.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“More telling was Jefferson’s honest insight into the sexual nature of the master-slave relationship. He phrased the dirty secret with remarkable candor: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Jefferson was not a man of the Enlightenment only in the ordinary sense that he believed in reason or perhaps in rationality. He was very specifically one of those who believed that human redemption lay in education, discovery, innovation, and experiment. There were many such in the American Revolution.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“One paragraph in this bill of charges was of especial importance to Jefferson, and he was never to reconcile himself to having it struck out by his fellow committee members. It read as follows: He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms amongst us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another. The passage is of unusual interest. It shows that Jefferson understood not just the horrors of chattel slavery on American soil, but also the hellish conditions of the Middle Passage between Africa and America, where so many lives were callously extinguished. It also shows, by its use of the word obtruded, that he knew how to appeal to a certain self-righteousness in his audience (how dare black men fight on the side of the British, as they often did?) and—looking further ahead—that he saw no future for free black people in America. The references to the “piratical” and the “infidel” demonstrate an early awareness of the Muslim slave racket being carried on by the so-called Barbary powers of Islamic North Africa: yet another crisis which was to play its role in Jefferson’s subsequent career.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“Paine in his Common Sense had said, “Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

“But the idea that government arose from the people and was not a gift to them or an imposition upon them, was perhaps the most radical element in the Declaration.”
― 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