Frasi di Thomas Jefferson
pagina 13

Thomas Jefferson è stato un politico, scienziato e architetto statunitense.

È stato il 3º presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America ed è inoltre considerato uno dei padri fondatori della nazione. Il suo volto è ritratto sul monte Rushmore accanto a quelli di George Washington, Abraham Lincoln e Theodore Roosevelt.

Fu il principale autore della dichiarazione d'indipendenza del 4 luglio 1776 e uno dei fondatori del Partito Democratico-Repubblicano degli Stati Uniti. Fortemente segnato dal pensiero illuminista, fu fautore di uno Stato laico e liberale, sostenendo l'egualitarismo formale e legale di tutti gli esseri umani, anche se non volle pronunciarsi mai contro la schiavitù.

Fu inoltre anche un intellettuale di grande spessore: fondatore della Università della Virginia, ebbe un ruolo centrale nello sviluppo e nella costruzione di questa istituzione. Fu infine anche un architetto: suoi sono ad esempio i progetti per il campus dell'Università della Virginia, la sua casa di Monticello, parte del patrimonio dell'UNESCO dal 1987, nonché il Campidoglio di Richmond. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. Aprile 1743 – 4. Luglio 1826
Thomas Jefferson photo
Thomas Jefferson: 474   frasi 27   Mi piace

Thomas Jefferson frasi celebri

“Non posso vivere senza libri.”

citato in Michael Gelb, Il Genio che c'è in te

Thomas Jefferson Frasi e Citazioni

“Dio che ci ha donato la vita allo stesso modo ci ha donato la libertà. La mano violenta può distruggerle ma non separarle.”

Origine: Citato in Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774); The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edito da Andrew A. Lipscomb e Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 1, p. 211.

“Attribuire ad ognuno la direzione di ciò che il suo occhio riesce a sorvegliare.”

dalla lettera a Joseph C. Cabell, 2 febbraio 1816; in Antologia degli scritti politici, p. 109
Origine: Questo precetto è considerato l'anticipazione del principio di sussidiarietà adottato dall'Unione Europea a partire dal Trattato di Maastricht del 1992.

“Ho giurato sull'altare di Dio eterna guerra contro qualsiasi forma di tirannia sulla mente dell'uomo.”

Origine: Citato in Michael J. Gelb, Il genio che c'è in te.

“L'albero della libertà deve essere rinvigorito di tanto in tanto con il sangue dei patrioti e dei tiranni. Esso ne rappresenta il concime naturale.”

da una lettera a William Stevens Smith, 13 novembre 1787; citato in Adriano Sofri, Tiranno: quando si mette a morte il despota, la Repubblica, 7 novembre 2006, p. 53

Thomas Jefferson: Frasi in inglese

“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Variation: Disobedience to tyranny is obedience to God.
This statement has often been attributed to Jefferson and sometimes to English theologian William Tyndale, or Susan B. Anthony, who used it, but cited it as an "old revolutionary maxim" — it was widely used as an abolitionist and feminist slogan in the 19th century. Benjamin Franklin proposed in August 1776 a very similar quote (Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God) as the motto on the Great Seal of the United States http://www.greatseal.com/committees/firstcomm/reverse.html. The earliest definite citations of a source yet found in research for Wikiquote indicates that the primary formulation was declared by Massachusetts Governor Simon Bradstreet after the overthrow of Dominion of New England Governor Edmund Andros in relation to the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, as quoted in Official Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the State Convention: assembled May 4th, 1853 (1853) by the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, p. 502. It is also quoted as a maxim that arose after the overthrow of Andros in A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1883) by Samuel Adams Drake. p. 426
Misattributed

“I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.”

On his profits from slavery as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine, (October 2012)
Attributed

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Often attributed to Jefferson, no original source for this has been found in his writings, and the earliest established source for similar remarks are those of John Philpot Curran in a speech upon the Right of Election (1790), published in Speeches on the late very interesting State trials (1808):
: "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."

*In a biography of Major General James Jackson published in 1809, author Thomas Charlton wrote that one of the obligations of biographers of famous people is

:"fastening upon the minds of the American people the belief, that 'the price of liberty is eternal vigilance' " (in Thomas Usher Pulaski Charlton, The life of Major General James Jackson https://books.google.com.br/books?id=cEcSAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA85&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false; F.Randolph, & Co., 1809, p. 85).
Misattributed
Variante: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few" (from a speech by Wendell Phillips at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on January 28, 1852; quoted by John Morley, ed., The Fortnightly https://books.google.com.br/books?id=VfjRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=%E2%80%9CEternal+vigilance+is+the+price+of+liberty.%E2%80%9D+phillips+speech+anti-slavery&source=bl&ots=H2f8ckIw9o&sig=EukDrduBdK-oQSeY_Gf-VFQ6M54&hl=en&ei=SaxmTN-0H4P98AbioIi0BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CEternal%20vigilance%20is%20the%20price%20of%20liberty.%E2%80%9D%20phillips%20speech%20anti-slavery&f=false, Volume VIII, Chapman and Hall, 1870, p. 67).

“My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe”

As quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine, (October 2012)
Attributed

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

This quotation first appeared in Dreams Come Due: Government and Economics as if Freedom Mattered (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 312, written under the pseudonym of John Galt. It is there attributed to Jefferson, but is not found anywhere in his works. See the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/democracy-will-cease-to-exist-quotation.
Misattributed

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

Respectfully Quoted says this is "obviously spurious", noting that the OED's earliest citation for the word "deflation" is from 1920. The earliest known appearance of this quote is from 1935 (Testimony of Charles C. Mayer, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Seventy-fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 5357, p. 799)
Misattributed

“Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art.”

Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
1770s

“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”

Not attribution to Jefferson earlier than William Jennings Bryan's Baltimore address of January 20, 1900
California Digital Newspaper Collection, Los Angeles Herald http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH19000121.2.94.; appears in proximity to a reference to Jefferson in the 1878 "Notes of a Voyage to California Via Cape Horn", reprinting a 1850 Sacramento advertisment
via Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=Cis3Ni8wJkgC&pg=PA280 Samuel Curtis Upham, "Notes of a Voyage to California Via Cape Horn: Together with Scenes in El Dorado, in the Year 1849-'50, with an Appendix Containing Reminiscences: Together with the Articles of Association and Roll of Members of "The Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days of California".. Earliest known variant is from the August 31, 1844 issue of "Niles' National Register", authored by the committee of William C. Bryant, George P. Barker, John W. Edmonds, David Dudley Field, Theodore Sedgwick, Thomas W. Tucker, and Isaac Townsend.
via Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=M1oUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA438.
Misattributed

“The best government is that which governs least.”

Motto of United States Magazine and Democratic Review. First used in introductory essay by editor John L. O'Sullivan in the premier issue (October, 1837, p. 6 http://books.google.com/books?id=HGtJAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA6&dq=%22governs+least%22). Attributed to Jefferson by Henry David Thoreau, this statement is cited in his essay on civil disobedience, but the quote has not been found in Jefferson's own writings. It is also commonly attributed to Thomas Paine, perhaps because of its similarity in theme to many of his well-documented expressions such as "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one."
Misattributed
Variante: "That government is best which governs least"; reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 56

“I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.”

Thomas Jefferson libro Jefferson Bible

Letter to Charles Thomson (9 January 1816), on his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefJesu.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (the "Jefferson Bible"), which omits all Biblical passages asserting Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and resurrection. Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 498–499
1810s

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

Letter to Abigail Smith Adams http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/006/1200/1251.jpg from Paris while a Minister to France (22 February 1787), referring to Shay's Rebellion. "Jefferson's Service to the New Nation," Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/thomas-jefferson/history4.html
1780s

“[I]f the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour?”

1782, reported in Henry Brougham, Baron Brougham and Vaux, Historical Sketches of Statesmen who Flourished in the Time of George III (1845), Vol. II, p. 62.
1780s

“I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”

Letter to Edward Dowse (19 April 1803)
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

“Nearly all of it is now called in by the banks, who have the regulation of the safety-valves of our fortunes, and who condense and explode them at their will.”

Letter to John Adams (1819) http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/1819.html ME 15:224
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

“Louisiana, as ceded by France to the United States, is made a part of the United States; its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the United States, in analogous situations.”

Draft of proposed Amendment to the Constitution by Jefferson, who thought an amendment would be necessary to authorize the Louisiana Purchase to be incorporated into the United States (August 1803)
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

“The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated.”

Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:18: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 15, p. 18
1810s
Contesto: The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.

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