Thomas Jefferson Quotes
The commercial cities... are as different in sentiment and character from the country people as any two distinct nations, and are clamorous against the order of things established by the agricultural interest.
In Jefferson’s time most people aspired to acquire some land, and have their own home and farm on it. Immigrants come to the cities and worked to make enough money to go somewhere else and acquire some land to create a farm. However, over the last 100 years, the economy and human aspirations have changed. People are leaving the land and the farms to look for non-agricultural work and cities are expanding all over the world while rural area populations are declining. While undeveloped societies still have land reform pressure, industrial democracies have little pressure for individual ownership of land except to place a home on. Acreage for farming and ranching is no longer desirable for most people. In the United States, there are millions of acres of undeveloped land that can be purchased very cheaply as few people want to start farms or ranches any more. Alexander Hamilton’s vision of the American Economy has come to pass and not Jefferson’s.
Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826, 3rd President of the United States (Democratic Republican, VA), Letter to M. Pictet, 1803
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Buffet was the 2nd richest man in America and had been the beneficiary of the George W. Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and had profited from a strong economy but one which found middle class workers actually earning less each year.
This was his most famous speech.
Chesterton preceded by almost half a century much of the intellectual dispute of the War on Poverty of the 1960’s where much of the middle and upper class tried to change a variety of behavior patterns and customs and values of the poor.
Diamond’s observation refers to major technologies like farming and ability to use metals.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield. See Thomas Jefferson for a similar view.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He had previously served as the second vice president of the United States under John Adams between 1797 and 1801. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national levels.
