Thomas Jefferson.
More than a mere renaissance man, Jefferson may actually have been a new kind of man. He was fluent in five languages and able to read two others. He wrote, over the course of his life, over sixteen thousand letters. He was acquainted with nearly every influential person in America, and a great many in Europe as well. He was a lawyer, agronomist, musician, scientist, philosopher, author, architect, inventor, and statesman. Though he never set foot outside of the American continent before adulthood, he acquired an education that rivaled the finest to be attained in Europe. He was clearly the foremost American son of the Enlightenment.
Where are people like this today? Can you imagine the United States today if people like Jefferson and George Washington and Thomas Paine ruled throughout its history? If clear ideas, progress and free-thinking reigned supreme over Bush and Reagan's regressive "family values" based in fundamentalist Christianity? One can dream.
"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"
-Ronald Reagan (campaign speech, 1980)
"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
-George Washington (address to Congress, January 1790)
Where did it go wrong?
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"For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable." - Carl Sagan
Freedom consonant with responsibility.
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