Jon--could you provide info on the disavowal of bogus quotes by founders on
religion that you mention?--Mick Nicholls
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Kukla" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 12:19 PM
Subject: quotations and bogus quotations


> For what its worth, I too suspect its a bogus quote. It is amazing how
> many of those are in circulation.
>   About a dozen bogus quotes in which various of the founders spoke about
> Christianity - Henry included - have been disavowed by one of the
> right-leaning sites that had promoted them in the 90s.
>   More recently we've seen a scholastic poster marketed by a mainstream
> educational company that attributes to Henry a "quotation" from Voltaire
> - well actually another author's SUMMARY of something Voltaire wrote:
> The familiar version ("I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to
> the death your right to say it") attributed to the great French philosophe
> Voltaire was another writer's summary of Voltaire's whose actual words in
> a letter to M. le Riche, February 6, 1770: "I detest what you write, but I
> would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."
>
> As others have noted, the quotation in question sounds a bit formulaic and
> aphoristic for Jefferson - but it could well be somebody else's summary of
> an attitude he might have expressed.  The advice itself, for example, is
> not far off Jefferson's comment in a letter of 1803 to John Randolph of
> Roanoke about "the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among
> those who are to act together, for any common object, and the expediency
> of doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish."
>
> By the way: my searches for the words "swim" and "principle" in the UVA
> e-text center's online text of TJ's autobiography turn up no matches with
> the quote.
>
> Dr. Jon Kukla, Executive Vice-President
> Red Hill - The Patrick Henry National Memorial
> 1250 Red Hill Road
> Brookneal, Virginia 24528
> www.redhill.org
>
> > I was recently at a presentation where the speaker used an unfamiliar
> > Jefferson quotation and I have had no luck tracking down its citation. A
> > Google search led to 359,000 sites, but alas none of them on the first 5
> > pages gives me a citation. I have also checked the Jefferson Cyclopedia
> > and
> > staff at Monticello.
> >
> > Does anyone recognize this quotation and can you tell me from where it
> > comes:
> >
> > "In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim
> > with
> > the current."
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Robin Gabriel
> > Director of Education
> > Monticello
> >
>
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