I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.

A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.

We make no saint of Thomas Jefferson—we leave the mindless business of canonization and the worship of humans to the fanatics—but aware as we are of his many crimes and contradictions we say with confidence that his memory and example will endure long after the moral pygmies who try to blot out his name have been forgotten.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.