“Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.”

“I am not a Federalist,” he declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

“Rather than adjust his expectations in the face of disappointment, he (Jefferson) tended to bury them deeper inside himself and regard the disjunction between his ideals and the worldly imperfections as the world's problems rather than his own.”

“Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.”

“Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.”

“God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.”

“One of the petitioners, an infamous do-gooder of uncertain sanity named Warner Mifflin, had actually acknowledged that his antislavery vision came to him after he was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm.”