Misquoting Jefferson?

February 1, 2009

Statue of Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Memorial - Mr. Lant's HIstory page

Statue of Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Memorial, Rudulph Evans, sculptor – Library of Congress photo by Carol Highsmith, who graciously puts her photos in the public domain

A commentary from Cal Thomas caught my eye — little more than a few quotes from Thomas Jefferson strung together.  Jefferson seems oddly prescient in these quotes, and, also oddly, rather endorsing the views of the right wing.

From the way the text is laid out, and the brevity of the piece, I’m guessing it’s a radio commentary.

I read Jefferson often.  I’ve read Jefferson a lot.  I don’t recognize any of the quotes.

So I plugged them into the Jefferson collection at Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, which has a lot of Jefferson ready for full-text searching.

Oops.  None of the quotes scored a hit.

Couldn’t find them in the Library of Congress’s on-line list of quotes, either.

It looks as though Jefferson didn’t say these things that are being attributed to him.

Cal, is that you?

Cal, can you give us citations on these quotes?

How about you, Dear Reader?  Can you save Cal Thomas’s bacon by providing a citation for any of the quotes below, alleged to be from Thomas Jefferson?

AS WE LISTEN TO TALK OF BAILOUTS AND ENDLESS DEBT, THINK ON THESE THOUGHTS FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON:

“THE DEMOCRACY WILL CEASE TO EXIST WHEN YOU TAKE AWAY FROM THOSE WHO ARE WILLING TO WORK AND GIVE TO THOSE WHO WOULD NOT.”

HERE’S ANOTHER: “IT IS INCUMBENT ON EVERY GENERATION TO PAY ITS OWN DEBTS AS IT GOES. A PRINCIPLE WHICH IF ACTED ON WOULD SAVE ONE-HALF THE WARS OF THE WORLD.”

AND ANOTHER: “I PREDICT FUTURE HAPPINESS FOR AMERICANS IF THEY CAN PREVENT THE GOVERNMENT FROM WASTING THE LABORS OF THE PEOPLE UNDER THE PRETENSE OF TAKING CARE OF THEM.”

AND ONE MORE:  “MY READING OF HISTORY CONVINCES ME THAT MOST BAD GOVERNMENT RESULTS FROM TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT.”

There you have ’em, Dear Readers.  Did somebody hoodwink Cal Thomas into thinking these are Jefferson’s bon mots, when they are not?

Shake of the wet scrub brush to Truthseeker.

Below the fold, the complete Cal Thomas commentary.
Read the rest of this entry »

28 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, History, Quotes, Thomas Jefferson, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Richard Halverson, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, religion in America becomes enterprise

January 20, 2009

Rev. Richard C. Halverson, 1916-1995, Chaplain of the U.S. Senate; painting for the North Dakota Capitol by Ann Linton Hodge

Rev. Richard C. Halverson, 1916-1995, Chaplain of the U.S. Senate; painting for the North Dakota Capitol by Ann Linton Hodge

“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”

— Richard Halverson, former Chaplain of the United States Senate

At least, P. M. Summer claims Halverson said it, and I trust him.  Tip of the old scrub brush to P. M. Summer, at Una Perla, Por Favor.

4 Comments | History, Quotes, Religion, U.S. Senate | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Text of Obama’s prepared remarks

January 20, 2009

. . . from the Washington Post site.  Not sure yet if there were any departures from the text.

Leave a Comment » | Barack Obama, DBQ sources, Famous quotes, Quotes | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Stephen Jay Gould, evolution a question that thinking people ponder

January 4, 2009

Stephen Jay Gould, Massachusetts Academy of Sciences portrait

Stephen Jay Gould, photo from New York Times obituary

Q. Why is your work so popular?

A. It’s the subject more than anything else. I often say there are about half a dozen scientific subjects that are immensely intriguing to people because they deal with fundamental issues that disturb us and cause us to wonder. Evolution is one of those subjects. It attempts, insofar as science can, to answer the questions of what our life means, and why we are here, and where we come from, and who we are related to, and what has happened through time, and what has been the history of this planet. These are questions that all thinking people have to ponder.

— Stephen Jay Gould, interviewed by Daniel S. Levy, for Time Magazine, published Monday, May 14, 1990

Leave a Comment » | Biology, Evolution, Famous quotes, Quotes, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Whiskey and Cigar Day 2008: Churchill and Twain

November 30, 2008

Encore Post:  From 2007; alas, things at the Texas State Board of Education have gotten no better.

Mark Twain, afloat

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), and Winston Churchill (1874).

Twain had a comment on recent actions at the Texas Education Agency:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.

– Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win a Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.

Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.

Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.

churchill-time-cover-man-of-the-year-1941.jpg

Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.

Both men are worth study.

Twain, on prisons versus education: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900

Churchill on the evil men and nations do:

“No One Would Do Such Things”

“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”

—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49.

Image of Twain aboard ship – origin unknown. Image of Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine.

More on Mark Twain

More on Winston Churchill

Orson Welles, with Dick Cavett, on Churchill, his wit, humor and grace (tip of the old scrub brush to the Churchill Centre):

6 Comments | Biography, Books, Good Quotes, Great Speeches, Heroes, History, Journalism, Literature, Mark Twain, Patriotism, Peace, Quotes, Travel, Winston Churchill, World War II | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Santayana on science, “timid reappearance in modern times”

November 22, 2008

At its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmic theories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in sober laborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries — the earth’s roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, the development and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus, and a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was a patient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly and without a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormed imaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once the notion of nature’s dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possession in detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn in order to maintain the main position.

Nevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into a system, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general physics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole existent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their system. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral world, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicable addendum. Similarly Newton’s mechanical principles, broad as they were, were conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until the nineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated given their full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza’s system, though naturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had no influence on science and for a long time little even on speculation.

Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which shall include all existences–gods no less than men, if gods actually exist–is one not yet current, although it is implied in every scientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary movements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men’s minds back to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movements is the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such an irresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has been emancipated from authority and has set to work to square men’s conscience with history and experience. This theology has generally passed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognises the universal empire of law and conceives man’s life as an incident in a prodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests are produced and devoured. This “idealism” is in truth a system of immaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While it works with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist would care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except what the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and expressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a translation of physical evolution into mythical language, which presents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in that of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, and just those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are not brought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly and unawares, by their religious speculations.

— George Santayana, Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. 1, Reason in Common Sense; Chapter 1, “Types and Aims of Science.” Dover Publications, New York, 1980; from Charles Scribner & Sons 1905 edition.  This section carries a sidebar with the notation, “Its timid reappearance in modern times.”

(Text provided by the Gutenberg Project, here.)

Santayana on the cover of Time Magazine, 1936. Copyright by Time, Inc.

Santayana on the cover of Time Magazine, 1936. Copyright by Time, Inc.

Which philosophers have made the cover of Time since Santayana?

Leave a Comment » | Quotes, Science | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Book of Proverbs, on winking

October 12, 2008

12 A scoundrel and villain,
who goes about with a corrupt mouth,

13 who winks with his eye,
signals with his feet
and motions with his fingers,

14 who plots evil with deceit in his heart—
he always stirs up dissension.

15 Therefore disaster will overtake him in an instant;
he will suddenly be destroyed—without remedy.

Proverbs 6 (New King James Version)

9 The man of integrity walks securely,
but he who takes crooked paths will be found out.

10 He who winks maliciously causes grief,
and a chattering fool comes to ruin.

11 The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life,
but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked

Proverbs 10

29 A violent man entices his neighbor
and leads him down a path that is not good.

30 He who winks with his eye is plotting perversity;
he who purses his lips is bent on evil.

Proverbs 16

2 Comments | Famous quotes, Humor, Literature, Politics, Quotes | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., on taxes

October 9, 2008

The frequently quotable Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., circa 1930. Edited photograph from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Original photo by Harris & Ewing. LC-USZ62-47817. Copyright expired.

The frequently quotable Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., circa 1930. Edited photograph from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Original photo by Harris & Ewing. LC-USZ62-47817. Copyright expired.

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., attributed.  (see Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court, Harvard University Press, 1961, page 71.)

Did Holmes say that?

The quote is all over the internet Wednesday, after New York Times op-ed writer Tom Friedman noted it in his column criticizing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for her assertion that paying taxes is not patriotic.

I found reference to the quote in a book about eminent economists, through Google Scholar:

Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies
By Michael Szenberg
Published by Cambridge University Press, 1993
320 pages

On page 201, Szenberg refers Holmes’s view of “taxation as the price of liberty.”  In a footnote, he points to Justice Frankfurter’s book.  The quote is dolled up a little.  According to Szenberg’s footnote:

More precisely, he rebuked a secretary’s query of “Don’t you hate to pay taxes?” with “No, young fellow, I like paying taxes, with them I buy civilization.”

Frankfurter is a reliable source.  It’s likely Holmes said something very close to the words Friedman used.

Urge others to buy a chunk of civilization:

Add to FacebookAdd to NewsvineAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Furl

17 Comments | Famous quotes, Good Quotes, Government, History, Quotes, Taxes | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Mark Twain, on speculating in stocks

October 6, 2008

Mark Twain in 1907 - A.F. Bradley, New York, copyright, Mark Twain, three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing slightly right, with cigar in hand 1907. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Mark Twain in 1907 - A.F. Bradley, New York, copyright, Mark Twain, three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing slightly right, with cigar in hand 1907. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

October.  This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in.  The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

Leave a Comment » | Books, Famous quotes, Financial literacy, History, Humor, Quotes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

But, did Lee really say it?

September 9, 2008

Kevin Levin at A Civil War Memory checks out an almost-Sherman-like quote attributed to Gen. Robert E. Lee. “It is good that war is so terrible,” Lee is reputed to have started out . . .

Levin shows again why so many regard him as a very good historian.

2 Comments | 1861-1865, Accuracy, Civil War, Famous quotes, History, Quotes, War | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Wrong in the small things

September 5, 2008

21“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ Matthew 25:21 NIV

As I’ve listened to the Republican speeches this week, I’ve noticed a nasty trend:  They get small things wrong, usually just for a good line.  Good Hollywood writing, but snarky, and missing historical context.  Good speeches, but a preface to bad policy, I fear.

Two examples.

First, I listened to the smarm from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee Wednesday night. It’s always a struggle to listen to Huckabee because of the way he mangles facts.  He had a great laugh line:

In fact, I don’t know if you realize this, but Sarah Palin got more votes running for mayor in Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden did in two quests for the presidency — that oughta tell you something.

Well, yeah, it tells me Mike Huckabee can’t count.

I remember looking at vote totals, and Biden’s were not great, compared to others like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  But I would have sworn Biden got a couple thousand votes in Texas, or some other race after he’d dropped out.  That should be approximately equal to a winning candidate in a town like Wasilla, which has 9,000 residents if you count the sled dogs and every moose that’s ever wandered through (slight exaggeration — the population is officially listed at under 6,000).

Sure enough, it turns out that Biden got almost 80,000 votes in the Democratic primaries this campaign.  Palin would have had to have gotten every man, woman, child and dog in Wassilla to vote for her, nine times each, to equal that vote. Huckabee was off by a factor of 9.   Huckabee can’t count.

What else in Huckabee’s speech was off by a factor of 9?

Then, Thursday night, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge said that 230 years ago this nation was founded by men who were called mavericks themselves:

More than 230-plus years ago, a group of leaders – some people called them mavericks – dared to think differently, dared to act boldly and dared to believe its future leaders would preserve, honor and protect the great land of the free.

Oh, really?  Who called them mavericks?  That would have been very prescient of them — the phrase didn’t come into use until cattle became big business in Texas, more than 100 years after the founding.  The word comes from a Texas cattleman, Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870), who used to leave his stock unbranded, and then claim all unbranded cattle on a range as his.  It was a semi-legal way to steal cattle from his neighbors.

Critically, Maverick’s having been born in the year of the Louisiana Purchase, it’s highly unlikely that anyone in Philadelphia in 1776, the event Ridge was obviously referring to, would have called themselves after his actions 75 or 100 years or more in the future.

David Barton, the King of the Misquote and Mangled Quote, was a Texas delegate — surely he could have corrected these minor historical errors — had Barton any idea about what really happened in history.

Should we dismiss this errors as one-liner jokes, or do Republicans really deserve criticism for failing to know history?  It’s astounding that they’d get wrong the well-known history of our founding, don’t you think?

Coupled with Sarah Palin’s defense of the Pledge of Allegiance — “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me” (the pledge was written by a socialist minister in 1892, more than a century after the Constitution) — one could make a case that ignorance is a value the Republicans value, in their audiences.

35 Comments | Accuracy, America's founding, Elections, History, Hoaxes, Quotes | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Teddy Roosevelt at the Minnesota State Fair

August 21, 2008

It’s state fair time!

Which state fair has the most fried foods? Which state fair has the oddest fried foods? You can make nominations in comments.

State fairs drive local economies, sometimes, and occasionally a bit of history gets made there. Certainly they are places where culture and history are on display.

Minnesota’s State Fair is so good even Teddy Roosevelt visited — it’s been an almost annual event since 1859. I’ll bet Roosevelt had a good time, though I wonder if the Fair served him a bag of their famous mini-donuts — 388,000 bags of donuts served last year (do they rival corny dogs?).

Then Vice President Theodore Roosevelt tell Americans our foreign policy should be to

Then Vice President Theodore Roosevelt tell Americans our foreign policy should be to “speak softly, and carry a big stick!” September 3, 1901. President William McKinley was shot on September 6, and died just over a week later; Roosevelt was sworn in as president on September 14.

Check out Minnesota’s State Fair with this 21-question interactive quiz by Dave Braunger at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — see how well you know or can guess Minnesota history, and compare it to your own state fair if you’re not in Minnesota.

Corny dog, called a Pronto Pup, at the Minnesota State Fair. Pronto Pups are wan copies of Fletcher's Corny Dogs, from the Texas State Fair. Image from Travel.Garden.Eat

Corny dog, called a Pronto Pup, at the Minnesota State Fair. Pronto Pups are wan copies of Fletcher’s Corny Dogs, from the Texas State Fair. Image from Travel.Garden.Eat

4 Comments | Education, Famous quotes, Food history, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Quotes, Theodore Roosevelt | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Thought of the moment: Environmental movement most diverse

August 6, 2008

Environmentalism is the most politically diverse movement in history. Here in the Kingsnorth climate camp, I have met anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives and, mostly, pragmatists. I remember sitting in a campaign meeting during the Newbury bypass protests and marvelling at the weirdness of our coalition. In the front row sat the local squirearchy: brigadiers in tweeds and enormous moustaches, titled women in twin sets and headscarves. In the middle were local burghers of all shapes and sizes. At the back sat the scuzziest collection of grunge-skunks I have ever laid eyes on. The audience disagreed about every other subject under the sun – if someone had asked us to decide what day of the week it was, the meeting would had descended into fisticuffs – but everyone there recognised that our quality of life depends on the quality of our surroundings.

The environment is inseparable from social justice. Climate change, for example, is primarily about food and water. It threatens the fresh water supplies required to support human life. As continental interiors dry out and the glaciers feeding many of the rivers used for irrigation disappear, climate change presents the greatest of all threats to the future prospects of the poor. The rich will survive for a few decades at least, as they can use their money to insulate themselves from the effects. The poor are being hammered already.

British ecologist, journalist and activist, George Monbiot (Wikimedia image)

British ecologist, journalist and activist, George Monbiot (Wikimedia image)

Leave a Comment » | Climate change, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, Global warming, History, Politics, Quotes, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Celebrating darkness, ignorance, and calumny

August 1, 2008

Quote of the moment:

Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.

— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1

I thought of that line of Dickens’s when I read of this celebration of darkness, ignorance and calumny. Although, with the recent renewing of Limbaugh’s contract, it may no longer be true that his particular brand of darkness is cheap.

Still, it remains dark.

Scrooge meets Ignorance and Want, the products of his stinginess (drawing by John Leech, 1809-1870)

Scrooge meets Ignorance and Want, the products of his stinginess (drawing by John Leech, 1809-1870)

(More about the drawing below the fold)

Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Books, Economics, Famous quotes, Literature, Politics, Poverty, Quotes, Radio | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Encore post: Jefferson on religious freedom, “infidels of every denomination”

July 31, 2008

Jefferson on religious freedom

Thomas Jefferson

August 1, 2006

 *

In his Autobiography Jefferson recounted the 1786 passage of the law he proposed in 1779 to secure religious freedom in Virginia, the Statute for Religious Freedom:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and the Infidel of every denomination.

Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Modern Library 1993 edition, pp. 45 and 46.

* Image is a photo of detail from a painting of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, courtesy of the New York Historical Society by way of the Library of Congress.

[Encore post from August 1, 2006]

An encore post; fighting ignorance takes repetition.

Save

Save

2 Comments | 1787, America's founding, Bill of Rights, Civil Rights, Famous quotes, First Amendment, History, Law, Quotes, Religion, Religious Freedom, U.S. Constitution | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »