Word: jefferson
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...optimist's severest test of character. Thomas Jefferson, who made the "pursuit of happiness" part of the American way of life, kept the faith until he died, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence...
...Jefferson was nearly 66 when he stepped down from the presidency-the point at which Dumas Malone begins this sixth and final volume of his awesomely thorough biography, Jefferson and His Time. But he remained a man of uncommon vigor...
Life at Monticello was a case of hyperactive retirement. Jefferson always argued that no occupation was "so delightful to me as the culture of the earth." Now he had the chance to prove it, every morning after breakfast. Dinner, served at 4, constituted the social hour. The patriot gathered his clan about him: his daughter Martha, who ran the household, plus a varying assortment of twelve grandchildren, as well as random aunts, sons-in-law and omnipresent house guests...
...evening Jefferson read. "I can not live without books," he confessed. He preferred Greek and Latin classics in the original. He cherished his Homer, his Thucydides, his Tacitus, though he was too much of a pragmatist to abide Plato's "foggy mind...
...Jefferson's ultimate optimism to believe he could turn the whole world into readers. If human beings were not yet guided by reason, it was because they had not read enough books. So 6,487 volumes from his own library ended up forming the nucleus of the Library of Congress, and he devoted his final energies to founding what would become the University of Virginia...