Thomas Jefferson Legacy Quotes

“Deeply reluctant to judge a Founder as wanting in moral force, modern commentators retreat to a range of adjectives such as ‘flawed,’ ‘human,’ ‘contradictory,’ ‘paradoxical,’ ‘compartmentalized,’ while preserving for [Thomas] Jefferson what [one] historian...calls ‘a fundamental core of naïve innocence.’* But at Jefferson’s core there lay a fundamental belief in the righteousness of his power. Jefferson wore racism like a suit of armor, knowing that it would always break the sharpest swords of the idealists.”
― Henry Wiencek

“In politics and in his personal life, Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man, but in one thing he was consistent: the wanted the best of everything, for himself and for his country.”
― Thomas J. Craughwell, Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America