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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