All to honor Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

—Abraham Lincoln to H.L. Pierce and others, April 6, 1859  {More}

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

—John F. Kennedy, Remarks at dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere, April 29, 1962  {More}

The fathers of this republic waged a seven years war for political liberty. Thomas Jefferson taught me that my bondage was, in its essence, worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

—Frederick Douglass, address in Baltimore, 17 Nov. 1864  {More}

I consider you [John Adams] and him [Jefferson] as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.

—Benjamin Rush to John Adams, Philadelphia, 17 Feb. 1812  {More}

Books were at all times his chosen companions…he derived more pleasure from his acquainteance with Greek and Latin than from any other resource of literature…I saw him more frequently with a volume of the classics in his hand than with any other book.

—Ezra Stiles. Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, (NY: Scribners & Sons, 1901), p. 125.  {More}

Mr. Jefferson has hitherto been distinguished as the quiet modest, retiring philosopher - as the plain simple unambitious republican. He shall not now for the first time be regarded as the intriguing incendiary - the aspiring turbulent competitor.

—“Catullus” No. III (Alexander Hamilton), Gazette of the United States, 29 September 1792  {More}