American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, is a 1996 book written by Joseph Ellis, a professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. It won the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Read more about American Sphinx: The Character Of Thomas Jefferson:  Overview, Reception, Relationship Between Jefferson and Hemings

Famous quotes containing the words thomas jefferson, american, character, thomas and/or jefferson:

    “Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”
    —Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    “It is to be lamented that the principle of national has had very little nourishment in our country, and, instead, has given place to sectional or state partialities. What more promising method for remedying this defect than by uniting American women of every state and every section in a common effort for our whole country.”
    —Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)

    “The character of the logger’s admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it.... He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree.... What right have you to celebrate the virtues of the man you murdered?”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Disdainfulness
    I have again;”
    —Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)

    “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather-bed.”
    —Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)