“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
Documented source
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About this line
Jefferson was 73. Adams was 81. They had been rivals, then enemies, then slowly, grudgingly, friends again — two men who had made the American republic together and then spent decades disagreeing about what it meant. Their late correspondence is remarkable: two very old men trying to settle the accounts of their lives. Jefferson’s argument here is almost philosophical — that what a country aspires to matters more than what it has done, that the future is always larger than the past, and that betting on human possibility is not naivety but the only rational wager available. He was in his seventies and he still believed it.
Why we carry this line
I’m with him — the dreams beat the history. But I’ve still watched a lot of the history documentaries. This quote was used in one of them. I immediately put search into action to see if it was verifiable. It was. Added to Quoteiac catalog.
