Was Thomas Jefferson really as much of a douche

[quakerboy]

as the bulk of his easily available quotes would indicate?

[LostInAnomie]

1. I've always got the impression that Jefferson was VERY in love with himself.

[proteus_lives]

3. Well, he was the worst kind of arrogant SOB.

The kind that can back up his big talk.

[Odin2005]

2. Context please?

What quotes make him look like a jerk? :shrug:

[Bucky]

12. Jefferson quotes that reveal his assholish nature

Determine never to be idle... It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing. I have found it is particularly easy to do Katherine Greene of Providence, Rhode Island.
-- Jefferson, on avoiding laziness

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day, much like John Quincy Adams's wiener disappears like a spirit in the presence of the ladies.
-- Jefferson, on education and liberty

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. And by "free state" I mean every state that isn't Rhode Island, a notorious den of debauchery and assholes.
-- Jefferson, on vigilance among the citizenry

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom. The second chapter in the book of wisdom has to do with not sharing a confined space with John Quincy Adams, whose breath is the most foul thing in any room in which he hasn't farted yet.
-- Jefferson, on the virtue of being forthright

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
-- Jefferson, on the virtue of civic ignorance

[Deja Q]

15. In numerical order, what's wrong with #s 1, 2, or 4?

For #s 3 and 5, Thomas was a bit of a nit... it's as simple as that. For once...

The Greeks and Romans weren't exactly perfect either, and was he there at the time to know every single one of them was just a soldier?

And what is a person who prides in being ignorant in civil affairs doing leading anything of a civic nature?!

[Name removed]

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[Common Sense Party]

5. Such as...?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

6. Sage

Now what, sucka?

[omega minimo]

7. Well only a few of you repsonded. Maybe most people on DU aren't that stoopid.

[omega minimo]

8. .

[arcadian]

9. Flames & Tears

[Name removed]

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[Bucky]

11. You kinda get that impression from the two biographies I've read.

He was brilliant, but a bit of a Gore Vidal. His theories and rhetoric about human liberty were rock solid and a necessary building block in the country's destiny. But you kinda get the impression that if you met him personally, it'd only be a matter of time before he let you know how much smarter than you he was.

He also had a tendency to get sloppy with facts--particularly later in life. He was like an absent minded professor, lacking any true peers who could keep his argumentation skills well honed. He also seems to have had a weakness for married women. History records a couple of fumbled passes at Virginia ladies, but his greatest affair, which led to his brilliant, if self indulgent, essay "a Dialogue Between the Heart and Head," was actually an attempt to get into the petticoats of a certain married English actress that he met in Paris.

Later on, rejected by too many women, he took up with a slave who was also his first wife's half sister.

.

[Odin2005]

13. He' s been speculated to have had Asperger's Syndrome, which would explain a lot of his behavior.

Us "Aspies" have a bad tendency of being brutally honest when tact is needed.

[Deja Q]

14. On the plus side, that also means we Aspies might actually get to succeed in life...

then again, it's also about time and circumstance.

[Bucky]

16. Having read the wiki page on it, I'm pretty sure he didn't have Asperger's.

Jefferson was highly social, witty, and personally respected by many people. He was a wonk, and a nerd at times, but hardly someone suffering from impaired nonverbal behaviors. He was an accomplished seducer of women (outside his occasional missteps) and the model of tact as president, reassuring the Federalist minority who feared in 1801 that he'd become an American Marat (mostly based on their own anti-Jefferson propaganda). He played the fiddle well and (proving he wasn't an Aspie) knew when to stop. They guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence and A Summary View of the Rights of British America clearly did not suffer from "verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance, use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker, auditory perception deficits, unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech, and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm."

He was an internally distracted genius, but hardly autistic.