Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
NUMBER:
1679
AUTHOR:
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
QUOTATION:
I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.
ATTRIBUTION:
THOMAS JEFFERSON, “Services of Jefferson” (1800?), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 7, p. 475 (1896).
