ItalianPortal - The Monday Morning Memo

This is the Italian Cafe across the street from my Paris office. Want to go in?

“Jefferson could not abide personal conflict. One of the reasons he was so notoriously ineffective in debate was that argument itself offended him. The voices he heard inside himself were all harmonious and agreeable, reliable expressions of the providentially aligned universal laws that governed the world as he knew it, so that argument struck him as dissonant noise that defied the natural order of things. Madison, who knew him better than any man alive, fully realized that there was an invisible line somewhere in Jefferson’s mind above which lay his most cherished personal and political ideals. Cross that line and you set off explosions and torrents of unbridled anger of the sort that got spewed at George III in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson did not regard such occasions as arguments, but as holy wars to the death.”

- Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History, p. 68

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