“But suppose Jefferson does betray us?” Dayton’s dislike of Jefferson was far more intense than mine because he hardly knew the President and so could despise him in the abstract. I have always found that this sort of passion is the most fierce, the least rational and the very stuff of which saints and conquerors […]
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“But I don’t want to be a lawyer.” “Well, who does? I mean what man of spirit? The law kills the lively mind. It stifles originality. But it is a stepping-stone …”
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Tags:Lawyers·Politics·The Law
It is a good thing, you know. They say England is a nation of shopkeepers. Well, (America) is a nation of lawyers. For the lawyer, anything is possible. For the rest of us impossible.
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Tags:Quotes·The Law
Jefferson tended to strike the self-righteous note in much the same way as a clock strikes the hour and like a familiar clock one does not hear the sound unless one is anxious, as I confess I was, to tell, as it were, the time.
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Tags:Quotes·self-righteousness
But Hamilton realized better than anyone that the world—our American world at least—loves a canting hypocrite.
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Jefferson was in an excellent mood. But what new president is not? His mistakes unmade, the future bright.
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Tags:leadership·mistakes·Politics·Quotes
Eventually all things are known. And few matter.
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We rode through a meadow filled with brick kilns. Slaves were everywhere, hard at work. I was surprised to see how “bright” they were. I do not know if that word is still in use in the south, but in those days a slave with a large degree of white blood was known as “bright.” […]
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Tags:hypocrisy·Slavery·Thomas Jefferson
Actually the movement to abolish black slavery in the south is deeply unpopular. It is not that New Yorkers so much like the institution of slavery as they dislike the sort of righteous people who want to abolish it.
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Tags:Electoralism·Ideology·Quotes·The Greens