Presidents Of The United States

"The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce its founder an impostor."

"Let the eye of vigilance never be closed."

"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 has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers. If on the contrary it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up."

"The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man."

"In our university [of Virginia] you know there is no Professorship of Divinity. A handle has been made of this, to disseminate an idea that this is an institution, not merely of no religion, but against all religion. Occasion was taken at the last meeting of the Visitors, to bring forward an idea that might silence this calumny, which weighed on the minds of some honest friends to the institution."

"No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity ... Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius. The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands of martyrs ... The Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such person, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck."

"The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty."

"To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life."

"An hereditary chief, strictly limited, the right of war vested in the legislative body, a rigid economy of the public contributions, and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses, will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive. But the only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure."

"I thank you, Sir, for the copy you were so kind as to send me of the revd. Mr. Bancroft's Unitarian sermons. I have read them with great satisfaction, and always rejoice in efforts to restore us to primitive Christianity, in all the simplicity in which it came from the lips of Jesus. Had it never been sophisticated by the subtleties of Commentators, nor paraphrased into meanings totally foreign to its character, it would at this day have been the religion of the whole civilized world. But the metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the maniac ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded it with absurdities and incomprehensibilities, as to drive into infidelity men who had not time, patience, or opportunity to strip it of its meretricious trappings[.]"

"Jefferson saw in the widespread ownership of land, in families made self-sufficient and independent by their farming, the best defence that could be erected against the arrogation of additional powers by the State, or by any who might wish to construct an economic or political oligarchy. Men, he frequently said, had not sought freedom in order to acquire property, but, rather, had acquired property in order to ensure freedom... Jefferson's analysis of democracy is one that still possesses a certain relevance. In so far as he believed that even the democratic State could become an elective tyranny, he spoke prophetically. In so far as he believed that property provided the best defence against that tyranny, he reminds us all of the importance of property, and of the dangers to democracy that result from its abolition."

"Jefferson's invention of the Wheel Cypher represents a contribution to cryptographic science so far in advance of his time that at least a century had to elapse before a similar invention was independently made by a second inventor in the field."

"The story of black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts."

"His anti-slavery sentiments, so forcibly given in his Notes on Virginia, will be quoted with impressive effect as long as slavery exists in our land. It is true, he was a slaveholder; and hence his theory was better than his practice. It is apparent, moreover, that he had clearer views of the impolicy of the slave-system, than of its guilt. But he never dishonored his judgement, or perverted his good sense, by attempting to prove the lawfulness of holding the colored race in bondage."

"Jefferson himself considered the people he enslaved in the coldest economic terms, saying he calculated that a “woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.""

"Directly or indirectly American classicism traces its ancestry to Jefferson, who may truly be called the father of our national architecture."

"You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you "hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country."

""Mr. Jefferson displays a mild, easy and obliging temper," commented the duc de La Rochefoucald-Liancourt, "though he is somewhat cold and reserved. His conversation is the most agreeable kind." Jefferson was open and approachable, yet he maintained an impregnable core of inner feeling that has frustrated his biographers. He had an insatiable curiosity about all aspects of life. His fondness for structure and order can be seen in the meticulous records he maintained on plant life and weather conditions at Monticello. Despite his many years in politics, he never acquired two attributes usually considered essential to success in that profession: a thick skin and a gift for oratory. He was acutely sensitive to public criticism and, although captivating in small groups, delivered notoriously unmoving speeches before large crowds. He tended to mumble softly out of earshot of much of his audience."

"Jefferson was not ashamed to call the black man his brother and to address him as a gentleman."

"With the sure sagacity of a leader of men, Washington at once selected, for the highest and most responsible stations, the three chief Americans who represented the three forces in the nation which alone could command success in the institution of the government. Hamilton was the head, Jefferson was the heart, and John Jay was the conscience. Washington's just and serene ascendancy was the lambent flame in which these beneficent powers were fused, and nothing less than that ascendancy could have ridden the whirlwind and directed the storm that burst around him."

"The natural equal rights of men. If Washington or Jefferson or Madison should utter upon his native soil today the opinions he entertained and expressed upon this question, he would be denounced as a fanatical abolitionist. To declare the right of all men to liberty is sectional, because slavery is afraid of liberty and strikes the mouth that speaks the word. To preach slavery is not sectional — no: because freedom respects itself and believes in itself enough to give an enemy fair play. Thus Boston asked Senator Toombs to come and say what he could for slavery. I think Boston did a good thing, but I think Senator Toombs is not a wise man, for he went. He went all the way from Georgia to show Massachusetts how slavery looks, and to let it learn what it has to say. When will Georgia ask Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner to come down and show her how liberty looks and speaks?"

"One cannot question the genuineness of Jefferson’s liberal dreams. He was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery."

"Wake up, America. Your liberties are being stolen before your very eyes. What Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln fought for, Truman, Acheson, and McGrath are striving desperately to nullify. Wake up, Americans, and dare to think and say and do. Dare to cry: No More War!"

"Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do."

"Jefferson, apparently very early in life, found most of this distinctive Christian superstructure unbelievable, save for the assurance of life after death. In the middle years of his life he affirmed the Semitic cosmology without the Christian superstructure, although not without some sense of loneliness in a society so assertively Christian. He was persuaded, in part by the strictures of orthodox critics, that his form of religious rationalism did not qualify as Christian, and thus he did not so profess. In times of stress and anxiety he sought inspiration and consolation not in Christian sources but in Stoic and Epicurean moral philosophers. Then, in a period stretching from the early 1790s until the time he became president, he discovered a minimalist, unitarian version of Christianity, most of whose tenets he could affirm. He remained a reasonably consistent advocate of such a unitarianism until he died."

"To the twentieth-century mind Jefferson's views on race stand in contrast to the liberal stance that he took on most of the major issues of the day; yet his repeated condemnation of the instutition of slavery and his insistent arguments that steps must be taken to bring it to an end placed him in advance of most, but far from all, eighteenth-century persons."

"All the Founding Fathers hated Democracy — Thomas Jefferson was a partial exception, but only partial."

"I don't know that Jefferson could have survived as a farmer then in that society without having an ability to work his farm with...slavery. It seems abominable to us looking back, but was a way of life then. And I think the saving grace of Jefferson's philosophy is that the things for which he stood and which he expressed so vividly and so clearly and emotionally, were what later permitted our country to escape from slavery itself."

"He honored religious teachers who did not use mystifications to gain illegitimate power, eventually believing Jesus the greatest of these. He appreciated the role of religious institutions. But he was very leery of any priesthood and had almost no involvement with any organized religious sect, possibly because he found the options available to him so uninviting... Jefferson never doubted such a creative and providential god, even when he tried without success to understand the views of authentic atheists. This cosmology remained the foundation of his private religious beliefs and a support both for objective knowledge and moral confidence. He was so certain of his beliefs in such a creative god, in a planned and ordered universe, and in a divinely implanted moral sense in each person, that he assumed, quite incorrectly as we know, that such beliefs were universal, at the heart of all religions. When anyone challenged such beliefs, he easily and routinely referred to the evidence of design in nature and in the human mind. Such evidence made belief in a creative and purposeful god unchallengeable, self-evident."

"There was not in all the colonial legislation of America one single law which recognized the rightfulness of slavery in the abstract; that in 1774 Virginia stigmatized the slave-trade as 'wicked, cruel, and unnatural'; that in the same year Congress protested against it 'under the sacred ties of virtue, honor, and love of country'; that in 1775 the same Congress denied that God intended one man to own another as a slave; that the new Discipline of the Methodist Church, in 1784, and the Pastoral Letter of the Presbyterian Church, in 1788, denounced slavery; that abolition societies existed in slave States, and that it was hardly the interest even of the cotton-growing States, where it took a slave a day to clean a pound of cotton, to uphold the system... Jefferson, in his address to the Virginia Legislature of 1774, says that 'the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state'; and while he constantly remembers to remind us that the Jeffersonian prohibition of slavery in the territories was lost in 1784, he forgets to add that it was lost, not by a majority of votes — for there were sixteen in its favor to seven against it — but because the sixteen votes did not represent two thirds of the States; and he also incessantly forgets to tell us that this Jeffersonian prohibition was restored by the Congress of 1785, and erected into the famous Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was re-enacted by the first Congress of the United States and approved by the first President."

"In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state's intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: "However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws." This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century."

"when Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Northwest, he hoped they’d find live mastodons roaming around. He really just couldn’t believe, even though he was very interested in fossils—he had a fossil room at the White House when he was there—he couldn’t believe these animals had gone extinct. It just wasn’t what happened. It wasn’t what the creator, you know, had planned for them."

"Racism is still a major issue because it is a habit. It is a devastating disease. But it took us 370 years to get to this place and 200 years to establish racism. It won't be obliterated by the passing of a law or the charismatic presence of a Malcolm X or Martin Luther King It will be a tedious process and a long one. We will have to have people with strong and big hearts working for a few generations to obliterate the ugliness of it. There's something little spoken of. In the early 1800's, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to a friend saying that we should send the slaves home to Africa. Why? Because, he said, it will take us five generations for them to forgive us."

"Jefferson surely knew slavery was wrong, but he didn't have the courage to lead the way to emancipation. If you hate slavery and the terrible things it did to human beings, it is difficult to regard Jefferson as a great man, or a good man. He was a spendthrift, always deeply in debt. He never freed his slaves... He could not rise above convenience. To be a slave-holder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way. One had to believe that the worst white man was better than the best black man. If you did not believe these things you could justify yourself to yourself. So Jefferson could condemn slavery in words, but not in deeds. Jefferson had slaves at his magnificent estate, Monticello, who were superb artisans, shoemakers, masons, carpenters, cooks. But like every bigot, he never said, after seeing a skilled African craftsman at work or enjoying the fruits of his labor, 'Maybe I'm wrong'. He already knew that. He ignored the words of his fellow revolutionary John Adams, who said that the revolution would never be complete until the slaves were free."

"The thoroughness with which Jefferson exorcised the influence of his opponents still astounds. He removed a whole cohort of young Federalists from civil and military offices; he eliminated domestic taxes; he substantially reduced the national debt; he shrank the size of the bureaucracy despite the growth in population and territory; he hastened the conveyance of national land to ordinary farmers; and he replaced Federalist formality with a nonchalance in matters of etiquette that quite amazed foreign dignitaries."

"Your character in history may easily be foreseen. Your administration will be quoted by philosophers as a model of profound wisdom; by politicians, as weak, superficial, and shortsighted. Mine, like Pope's woman, will have no character at all."

"Almost every other American statesman might be described in a parenthesis. A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception, and a few more strokes would answer for any member of their many cabinets; 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-transparent shadows."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"Jefferson's profound antagonism to the debasing effects of tyranny inspired his greatest lines of prose. He carried to his death his hostility to authoritarian doctrines, precedents, and officials. But Jefferson was more than a catalyst for the liberal opinions rife in the society, he was the live wire that made the connection between Enlightenment philosophy and American public policy... Successful in perpetuating his pristine republican style of government for a quarter of a century, Jefferson laid the intellectual foundation for limited government and the intellectual undergirding for Americans' suspicion of governmental power, even that exercised by the people."

"Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry."

"Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy"

"Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see."

"If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done."

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."

"The first consideration in immigration is the welfare of the receiving nation. In a new government based on principles unfamiliar to the rest of the world and resting on the sentiments of the people themselves, the influx of a large number of new immigrants unaccustomed to the government of a free society could be detrimental to that society. Immigration, therefore, must be approached carefully and cautiously."

"How development of nations keeps the reality a little behind the wish and the will. That is, the people live under a rule made by others. Each generation is governed, necessarily, by a former generation. Jefferson's great idea: Let it be governed by its own ideas."

"As early as 1774, Thomas Jefferson asserted in "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" that "the ability to migrate wasn't just an exercise of natural rights but the source of rights.... Liberty was made possible by the right to colonize, letting freemen, when their freedom was threatened, to move on to find free land and carry the torch from one place to another." As Grandin notes, Jefferson provided settlers "a historical and moral philosophy, telling them that their movement west wasn't just a fruit of freedom but the source of freedom." By 1805, Thomas Jefferson "couldn't think of any limit to U.S. expansion." In 1824, James Monroe stated, "There is no object which as a people we can desire which we do not possess or which is not within our reach." Here we can see the tension identified by Kotef as well as Hardt and Negri-a conception of sovereignty as "an open, expansive project operating on unbounded terrain" that exists alongside a "fantasy of closure and enclosure," involving "clearly demarcated territory, sealed within a border, which is a container of the people." Here we see that for certain subjects, movement is a manifestation of liberty that should be maximized. While for others, movement is something that must be tightly managed and regulated."

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

"Equal rights for all, special privileges for none."