Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was an American politician, lawyer, diplomat, jurist, governor, architect, and writer who worked across an unusually broad range of professional roles during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Born in 1743 in Shadwell, Jefferson received his education at the College of William & Mary. His professional life spanned law, diplomacy, and governance, and he held the position of governor at some point in his career. Throughout his working life he operated as a citizen of the United States, moving between legal, political, and diplomatic responsibilities.
Jefferson was also active as an architect and a writer, occupations that placed him in creative and intellectual work alongside his public duties. His facility with languages was considerable: he used English, French, Latin, Italian, and Greek, a range that reflects the breadth of his reading and correspondence. Writing in English as his primary language, he also drew on the classical and European tongues in the course of his work.
He died on July 4, 1826, at Monticello, the same year recorded across multiple sources as the date of his death. The combination of occupations he held — architect, writer, politician, jurist, lawyer, diplomat, and governor — together with his command of five languages, captures the varied character of a life carried out almost entirely in the service of public and intellectual work.
Quotes by Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson's insights on:
And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him.
But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself?
Those who labor on the earth are the chosen people of God if he ever had a chosen people.
We may consider each generation as a separate nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.
Beer, if drunk in moderation, softens the temper, cheers the spirit and promotes health.