Quotes

Everyone has a point to prove, and I wish they would just go ahead and try to prove it on their own rather than relying on dead people. You’ve heard it a million times: “Thomas Jefferson said this, this and this.”
And then they just leave the point hanging there, because they believe there is nothing more to say. That since Thomas Jefferson said it, there is no more need for debate, because it must be so.
I’ve often wondered how Thomas Jefferson would have felt about this. If he could have known that every brain-dead hick in a wifebeater and a Cat Diesel Power hat would end up using his words to prove, for example, that Ford is superior to Chevy.
And does anyone ever stop to think that Thomas Jefferson may have occasionally been wrong about something? Maybe Thomas Jefferson just had his head up his tuchas one day, or maybe he was hungover, or maybe he had taken a fact from the wrong press kit.
But none of that matters to anyone. He could have been staggering up the steps of Monticello one afternoon with a whiskey bottle on one hand and a couple of Vicodin in the other and hollered to ye olde scribe “All men are created equal, but the redheads are masters of them all! And you can quote me on that. Hahahaha.”
You know that contributers to the editorial pages of today’s newspapers would be writing, like they’re all intellectual and stuff, “…and in the words of Thomas Jefferson, redheads are our masters.”
Just because they’re dead doesn’t make them right. Look at Lincoln. He said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” Wrong. Every school kid can recite the Gettysburg address, whether they have any idea what it means or not.
The problem with ancient quotes is that they give us no sense of context. When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” for all we know he could have been speaking at an Antioch Pacifist Union women’s auxiliary breakfast. What else was he going to say? You know how those things go. The speaker always tells the audience what it wants to hear. He may hate dogs, but if he’s speaking to the Humane Society he’ll tell them he laps coffee out of a dish.
Have you ever noticed that nobody ever quotes Hitler? I’m sure that along the way he must have said something that made sense. Something like, “The first step in establishing a civilized community is an adequate public sewer system.” But you never see the head of the local Sanitary District stand up and say, “As we move forward on our $14 million, gravity feed collector system, I can only recall the words of Hitler when speaking about civilized communities…”
At least no one is trying to put words in his mouth, a status Jefferson could only wish for — which, in the words of Monty Python, “is a hell of a thing.