I was in Virginia recently for a wedding and had an opportunity to visit Monticello.
A visit to D.C. and other Founder-related sites should be mandatory for all American citizens at some stage in their life. I am in awe of these giant figures of great passion that did so much to have a positive impact on the world. This is what real change is. To risk body and soul to form a new country, a new political system based on an ideal, to do something that nobody in history had ever done before or since.
Some food for thought from Jefferson himself:
- Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
- Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself.
- Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous...
- Nothing in Europe can counterbalance the freedom, the simplicity, the friendship and the domestic felicity we enjoy in America.
- I hope and firmly believe that the whole world will, sooner or later, feel benefit from the issue of our assertion of the rights of man.
- I cannot live without books.
- [on France]... she is the wealthiest but worst governed country on earth.
- But why send an American youth to Europe for education?
- [on Great Britain]... of all nations on earth they require to be treated with the most hauteur. They require to be kicked into common good manners.
- There is a fullness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have a right to advance.
- There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
- The man who loves his country on its own account, and not merely for its trappings of interest or power, can never be divorced from it; can never refuse to come forward when he finds that she is engaged in dangers which he has the means of warding off.
- The man who is dishonest as a statesman would be a dishonest man in any station.
- Responsibility weighs with its heaviest force on a single head.
- With the same honest views, the most honest men often form different conclusions.
- As the Creator has made no two faces alike, so no two minds, and probably no two creeds.
- Nothing is so important as that America shall separate herself from the systems of Europe, and establish one of her own.
- My idea is that we should be made one nation in every case concerning foreign affairs, and separate ones in whatever is merely domestic.
- [on the Presidency]... no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.
- A nation ceases to be republican only when the will of the majority ceases to be the law.
- A nation united can never be conquered.
- The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But direct your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.
- It is always better to have no ideas than false ones and to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.
- Experience alone brings skill.
- You live in a country where talents, learning, and honesty are so much called for that every man who possesses these may be what he pleases.
- I am a real Christian; that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.
- The will of the people... is the only legitimate foundation of any government.
- Without virtue, happiness cannot be.
- The essence of virtue is in doing good to others.
