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Extract from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 12 Oct. 1813 [Quote]

we must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus ... there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse...

Extract from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813 [Quote]

But even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of Man. science had liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example had kindled feelings of right in the people. an insurrection has consequently begun, of science, talents & courage against rank and...

Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Alexis Marie Rochon, 14 Dec. 1813 [Quote]

I am glad to learn that you are shewing us the way to supply ourselves with some of the most necessary tropical productions, and that the bette-rave, which we can all raise, promises to supplant the cane particularly, and to silence the demand for the inhuman species of labour employed in it’s...

Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, 2 Jan. 1814 [Quote]

I think I knew General Washington intimately and thoroughly; and were I called on to delineate his character it should be in terms like these. His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, tho’ not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon or Locke;...

Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 10 Feb. 1814 [Quote]

I promised you a sample from my Commonplace book ... when I was a student of the law, now half a century ago, after getting thro Coke Littleton, whose matter cannot be abridged, I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections...

Extract from Thomas Jefferson to John Manners, 22 Feb. 1814 [Quote]

but with this objection, lying but in a small degree, Linnaeus’s method was recieved, understood, and conventionally settled among the learned, and was even getting into common use. to disturb it then was unfortunate. the new systems attempted in Botany, by Jussieu, in Mineralogy, by Haüy, are...

Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Brown, 28 Apr. 1814 [Quote]

one of the misfortunes of living too long is the loss of all one’s early friends and affections. when I review the ground over which I have passed since my youth, I see it strewed like a field of battle with the bodies of deceased friends. I stand like a solitary tree in a field, it’s trunk...