[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[April 11, 1994]
[Page 667]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Thomas Jefferson Dinner
April 11, 1994

    Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? We thought 
of how we might best honor Mr. Jefferson on this evening. And I did a 
little research and discovered that in addition to this being the end of 
our observation of the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, it 
is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edward Everett, who, like 
Thomas Jefferson and Warren Christopher, served as Secretary of State 
and whom you will all remember was supposed to be the person who 
delivered the real Gettysburg Address, at least according to Garry 
Wills. [Laughter] And so I thought I could follow Edward Everett's lead 
and speak for 2 hours tonight. [Laughter] And then I decided I wouldn't 
do that, that tonight should belong to Thomas Jefferson.
    Let me say that any person who is fortunate enough to be Secretary 
of State or Ambassador to France or Vice President or President feels 
immediately, in many ways, a great debt to Thomas Jefferson. But in a 
larger sense, every citizen who ever benefited from the powerful ideas 
of the Declaration of Independence, the devotion to education embodied 
in the founding of the University of Virginia, the belief in the first 
amendment enshrined in the statutes of religious liberty, all of us are 
in his debt.
    Tonight, I ask you to think of only one or two things as we begin 
this fine evening. Jefferson had the right tensions and balances in his 
life, and that is why he seems so new to us today. He believed that life 
had to be driven by fixed principles--life, liberty, the pursuit of 
happiness--but that we all had to be willing to be constantly changing. 
Life belongs to the living.
    He believed that we all had a right to a radical amount of freedom, 
in return for which we had to assume a dramatic amount of 
responsibility. He always was trying to accomplish very big things, but 
the richness and texture of his life, and the reason it seems so 
relevant to us today, is that he took such great joy in all the little 
things of daily life. And it was those things that enabled him to be not 
just a philosopher and a politician and a lawyer but also an architect 
and a scientist, a person who enjoyed the large and the small, who 
believed that life should be driven by eternal principles in constant 
change, who would gladly have given his life for freedom and who 
exercised that freedom so responsibly. Oh, if only we could do as well.
    On this 200th anniversary of his beginning, at the end of a 
wonderful year which included, for me and Hillary and our 
administration, the fact that we got to start our Inaugural at 
Monticello, let us raise our glasses in a toast not to the memory of 
Thomas Jefferson but to the vitality of his spirit and his ideas in our 
own lives and those of our country men and women for all time to come.

Note: The President spoke at 8:20 p.m. in the Benjamin Franklin Room at 
the Department of State. In his remarks, he referred to Garry Wills, 
author and adjunct professor, Northwestern University.