Petra

“The story became a clash between British tyranny and colonial liberty, scheming British officials and supplicating colonists, all culminating in the clash at Lexington and Concord between General Thomas Gage’s “ministerial army” and “the unsuspecting inhabitants” of Massachusetts. All this was conveyed in what we might call the sentimental style of the innocent victim.33 It is impossible to know how much of this cartoonlike version of the imperial crisis Jefferson actually believed and how much was a stylistic affectation.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx (National Book Award Winner): The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”
― Henry Kissinger

“There may be people to whose tempers and dispositions Contention may be pleasing,” he wrote to John Randolph in 1775, “but to me it is of all states, but one, the most horrid.” He much preferred “to withdraw myself totally from the public stage and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquillity, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.” The most astute student of Jefferson’s lifelong compulsion to make and then remake Monticello into a perfect palace and a “magical mystery tour of architectural legerdemain” has concluded that Jefferson’s obsessive “putting up and pulling down” are best understood as a form of “childhood play adapted to an adult world.” Both the expectations that Jefferson harbored for his private life in his mansion on the mountain, as well as his way of trying to design and construct it, suggested a level of indulged sentimentality that one normally associates with an adolescent.21”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx (National Book Award Winner): The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“He sang whenever he was walking or riding, sometimes when he was reading. His former slave Isaac reported that one could “hardly see him anywhar outdoors, but that he was a-singin’.” Bacon confirmed that “when he was not talking he was nearly always humming some tune, or singing in a low voice to himself.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx (National Book Award Winner): The Character of Thomas Jefferson