Clinton said he opened the bus trip at Monticello “not only because Thomas Jefferson was one of our greatest presidents and perhaps our most brilliant president ... but also because he believed in the power of ideas which have made this country great ... Jefferson believed in public service.”

For myself I found one thing to be true: having once begun a dialogue with Jefferson one continues the conversation with him forever.

All honor to Jefferson in our own world now, in 1994. We can never know enough about him. Indeed we may judge our own performance in how seriously and with what effect we take his teachings to heart. When he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he was speaking to the world then, but speaking to...

in the history of liberty he’s a great figure everywhere in the world. One always wonders what makes the difference between someone who has the tenacity to pursue his ideals and his beliefs against all opposition and a person who is just a politician. I think the great politicians and statesmen...

I am struck by how much the life and mysteries of Thomas Jefferson have animated, have confounded, and may ultimately reconcile our national life. He is a kind of Rosetta Stone of the American experience, a massive, tectonic intelligence that has formed and rattled the fault lines of our history...

the thing to remember from Jefferson is the power of the word. That ideas matter. That words, beautifully shaped, reshape lives. That a person who has certain disadvantages and flaws and even crimes, like holding slaves, can transcend his imprisonment within reality by casting out words that take...

Monticello, Little Mountain, a place forever known as the beloved home of the man who captured in words, better than anyone before or since, the essence of what makes America special.

Out of his own hopes and fears, his travels and reading, Jefferson invented an uniquely American West … In their maps and in their minds, by what they did and what they wrote, Lewis and Clark imprinted Jefferson’s western vision on a westering nation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The words are so familiar, so potent, so important, so grand and fine, it’s hard to believe that a person, any single person, actually wrote them, picked up a pen, dipped it in ink, and, on a blank white sheet, made appear...

The principles that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration became the guiding principles of the new nation. And at every generation, Americans have rededicated themselves to the belief that all men are created equal, with the God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness....