The Jefferson Literary and Debating Society is a debating and literary society at the University of Virginia. Founded in 1825, it is the oldest organization at The University and one of the oldest continuously existing debating societies in North America.
The Society meets at 7:29 on all Friday evenings when classes at the University of Virginia are in session, principally in Hotel C of the University's West Range, known colloquially as "Jefferson Hall", "Jeff Hall", or simply the "Hall". In former times it was popularly known around Grounds as the "Jeff."
The Greek letters of the Hall are Φ Π Θ - Phi Pi Theta - which are the initials of the Society's Greek motto: φίλοι, πατρίς, θεός (philoi, patris, theos, or "friends, fatherland, God"). After Phi Beta Kappa the Jefferson Society is the second oldest continually existing Greek-lettered organization in the country. The Hall's Latin motto, taken from Book 1, line 203 of Virgil's Aeneid, is Haec olim meminisse iuvabit - roughly translated, "In the future it will be pleasing to remember these things."
Well-known members of the Hall include Edgar Allan Poe, Woodrow Wilson, former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, Former University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III, and 2005 Miss America Deidre Downs. Several former and current members of the University's Board of Visitors also are members. Honorary members include James Madison, James Monroe, the Marquis de Lafayette, Margaret Thatcher, and Gordon Slynn, Baron Slynn of Hadley (who frequently visited the Society during his semi-regular trips to speak at the law school). Thomas Jefferson turned down an invitation for honorary membership in an August 12, 1825 letter, citing his need to avoid altering his relationship with the University and its students.
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Famous quotes containing the words jefferson, literary, debating and/or society:
“The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes, which you say you have heard insisted on by some, I assure you was never mine.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Whenever the society is dissolved, it is certain the government of that society cannot remain ... that being as impossible, as for the frame of a house to subsist when the materials of it are scattered and dissipated by a whirlwind, or jumbled into a confused heap by an earthquake.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)