Thomas Jefferson

He wrote that all men are created equal while owning over six hundred human beings across his lifetime. The contradiction is real, and the words are also real. Both things are true at once.

Thomas Jefferson was born in Virginia in 1743, served as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three, and became the third President of the United States. He was a voracious reader — he once wrote that he could not live without books — and his personal library of nearly seven thousand volumes became the foundation of the Library of Congress after the British burned Washington in 1814.

Jefferson believed in the future with a consistency that bordered on faith. He thought each generation should rewrite its own laws, that education was the foundation of a free society, and that curiosity was not optional for a thinking person. His record on human rights is a permanent asterisk on all of that — but his words on the life of the mind remain worth the argument.