State of the Union Addresses
These are Thomas Jefferson's actual words to Congress and the nation, delivered when America was still inventing itself. Spanning 1801 to 1809, the addresses capture a young republic navigating欧洲的战争风暴 while forging its identity in the world. Here Jefferson argues for peaceful commerce over military confrontation, champions a limited federal government, and addresses the unprecedented challenges of territorial expansion and Indigenous relations. The prose is often beautiful, sometimes chilling, always revealing of how the third president understood democracy's fragile experiment. Reading these addresses is not history as abstraction but history as lived speech: Jefferson explaining his reasoning to the people, defending his policies, laying out his vision for what America could become. For anyone curious about the foundations of American political thought, or anyone who wants to hear the founders argue for their vision of the nation in their own voices, this collection offers an intimacy no textbook provides.
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“the measure of society is how it treats the weakest members””
— Thomas Jefferson
“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.””
— Thomas Jefferson
“He [Weishaupt] says, no one ever laid a surer foundation for liberty than our grand master, Jesus of Nazareth.””
— Thomas Jefferson
“If you serve humanity, you serve humanity's God.””
— Thomas Jefferson
