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"Jefferson's draft of the Declaration included a long condemnation of George III for his support of the slave trade. 'He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.' Here is a recognition, on Jefferson's part, that the slave trade violated the 'most sacred rights of life and liberty.' And, Jefferson continued, the king was 'determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold.' In his draft of the Declaration, Jefferson applied the term men to slaves at the same time he affirmed that all men are created equal, and he asserted that the natural rights that provided the basis for the Declaration also applied to slaves." James Fishkin   "'Happiness is the aim of life, but virtue is the foundation of happiness,' Jefferson observed toward the end of his career, echoing Franklin's observation that 'virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.' A commonplace of classical philosophy, as dear to Aristotle as it was to Cicero, the statement captures well what few, if any, of the Founding Fathers would have denied. Endorsed by the principal authorities on which Jefferson drew in drafting the Declaration, his statement nonetheless reveals an inherent tension in the opposition of its second clause that is also the tension of the American experiment. Happiness indeed was the aim of life. And virtue, self-discipline, the ordered arrangement of desire were indeed the way to that end. But whether the goal itself could be fulfilled depended on individual decision and choice; happiness could never be imposed. And in that liberty—that freedom—lay a dilemma. For as Smith clearly recognized, and as he argued at length in The Wealth of Nations, 'augmentation in fortune is the means by which the greater part of men propose and wish to better their condition.' The greater part of men, that is, pursued happiness through wealth, a route that the so-called father of capitalism knew to be a devious path. And although this 'deception,' this trivial pursuit, was undeniably a powerful engine of growth, it was a dubious means to lasting satisfaction. Smith himself denied the connection, as did Jefferson, Franklin, and many others." Darrin McMahon   "As Jefferson put it in an April 16, 1784, letter to George Washington, the foundation on which any constitution must rest is 'the denial of every preeminence.' In his 1786 'Answers to Monsieur de Meusnier's Questions,' Jefferson argued that the essence of America was that 'the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.' Even Hamilton, who made no attempt to conceal his belief in a strong executive, argued in Federalist 71 that the president had to be 'subordinate to the laws.' The notion of law simply makes no sense, and has no good purpose, unless all are bound by its dictates." Glenn Greenwald   "As a writer, Obama's strength is telling stories, and his account of America is a kind of story, mixing social, intellectual, and political history. It begins with the Founding—with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. He tries to construct a new consensus view of the country that acknowledges and then contextualizes traditional views in a way meant to be reassuring but that points to very untraditional conclusions. For instance, in The Audacity of Hope, in a chapter titled 'Values,' he quotes the Declaration's famous sentence on self-evident truths and then comments: Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundations of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration—that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can't be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands. It sounds almost Lincolnian until one notices that the rights in this bundle are not said to be natural, exactly, nor true and certainly not self-evident; they are an outgrowth of 18th century political thought, too recondite for most Americans to know or remember. Abraham Lincoln, when explaining the Declaration, traced its central idea to God and nature, not to 18th century ideologies. He called for 'all honor to Jefferson' for introducing 'into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.' When Jefferson was asked about the document’s source and purpose, he looked to common sense as well as to a much older and richer philosophical tradition." Charles Kesler   "Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can, he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." Thomas Jefferson   "A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." Thomas Jefferson   "Even the most radical members of Congress professed a strong preference for remaining in the empire. So late as August 25, 1775, Jefferson wrote in a private letter that he sincerely wished for reunion and 'would rather be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation on earth, or than on no nation.' He added, however, that rather than submit to the unlimited power that Parliament claimed over the colonies, which, as recent experience demonstrated, it would exercise with cruelty, he would lend his hand 'to sink the whole island in the ocean.' At that time the colonists sought, as a Virginia newspaper essayist later put it, not a 'total separation from Britain' but a 'constitutional Independence, founded on the ancient Charters and original contracts of the Colonies, and warranted by the laws of nature,' which would give 'a total exemption from Parliamentary Government, under the allegiance of the Crown of England.'" Pauline Maier   "The acknowledged novelty of the new American nation's political experiments has too often obscured the equally strong sense contemporaries had that they were entering a new economic era as well. Gouverneur Morris, for instance, called his fellow countrymen of 1782 'the first born children of extended Commerce in modern Times.' Americans were repeatedly characterized as eager market participants—certainly when it came to spending and borrowing—and commerce itself was associated with a remarkable augmentation of wealth-producing possibilities. 'The spirit for Trade which pervades these States is not to be restrained,' George Washington wrote to James Warren in 1784. Jefferson, eager to build canals linking the Chesapeake to the interior valleys of Virginia, wrote Washington that since all the world was becoming commercial, America too must get as much as possible of this modern source of wealth and power." Joyce Appleby   "No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press. It is therefore the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions." Thomas Jefferson   "In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them. Let them then continue quiet at home, take care of their women and children, and remove from among them the agents of any nation persuading them to war, and let them declare to us explicitly and categorically that they will do this; in which case they will have nothing to fear from the preparations we are now unwillingly making to secure our own safety." Thomas Jefferson   "'It cannot be to our interest,' Jefferson had written in 1814, 'that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy'; it would be better to fight 'than see the whole force of Europe wielded by a single hand.' If the European balance was deemed essential to the safety of the United States in the age of the frigate, it would conceivably seem even more essential in the age of the bomber." Arthur Schlesinger   "If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy." Thomas Jefferson   "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation." Thomas Jefferson   "To give praise where it is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will, therefore, say, that Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people." Thomas Jefferson   "Nothing but free argument, raillery and even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion." Thomas Jefferson   "The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty." Thomas Jefferson   "When Jefferson wrote, 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable,' he was putting into words a view of the individual and society which had its roots in thirteenth-century England or earlier. It is not, as we know, a view that is either universal or undeniable, but neither is it a view that emerged by chance in Tudor or Stuart England." Alan Macfarlane   "Let mercy be the character of the law-giver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge, or of the executive power, will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing men." Thomas Jefferson   "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." Thomas Jefferson   "Having always observed that public works are much less advantageously managed than the same are by private hands, I have thought it better for the public to go to market for whatever it wants which is to be found there; for there competition brings it down to the minimum value." Thomas Jefferson