If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous, you need to go to Monticello.

As one of our Founding Fathers, the person who drafted our Declaration of Independence, somebody who not only was an extraordinary political leader but also one of our great scientific and cultural leaders, Thomas Jefferson represents what’s best in America.

Together, Lafayette and Jefferson imagined something that seemed impossible—mainly American independence and the rights of—human rights and the rights of the citizen. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and Lafayette was also involved in drafting the Rights of the Citizen,...

The fathers of this republic waged a seven years war for political liberty. Thomas Jefferson taught me that my bondage was, in its essence, worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

It was, Virginia, your own Thomas Jefferson that taught me that all men are created equal.

The intellect of the negro was then, as now, the subject of learned inquiry. Mr. Jefferson, among other statesmen and philosophers, while he considered slavery an evil, entertained a rather low estimate of the negro’s mental ability. He thought that the negro might become learned in music and in...

Gov. Wilson of New Jersey, speaking to the toast, “What Would Jefferson Do?” ... declared that had Jefferson lived to-day he would, with clear-sightedness, have acted on the facts as they actually are ... Monopoly, private control, the authority of privilege, the concealed mastery of a few men...

The immortality of Thomas Jefferson does not lie in any one of his achievements, or in the series of his achievements, but in his attitude towards mankind and the conception which he sought to realize in action of the service owed by America to the rest of the world ... one of the things which...

Jefferson had many charms; Was democratic; still—and yet What should one do? The family arms On coach and spoon he wisely set Against historical alarms: For quality not being loath, Nor quantity, nor the fame of both.

Thomas Jefferson? Were that gentleman alive today he would be the first to condemn the stupid erudition mistaken in his honor. I imagine I see the sarcastic smile with which his shade must receive this fashionable design proposing to drag his mortal remains to the surface of the present ... in...