On my way home I was wandering aimlessly browsing stores and walked into a second hand bookstore and found The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson for 1.99 euros! The book includes many of his longer and shorter works and a large selection of letters. My favorite is Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Isaac McPherson (13 August 1813) which includes the wonderful quote:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Thomas Jefferson was also in Paris during the French revolution and I am looking forward to reading his letters during this period. Some red wine and an interesting discussion with Thomas is my idea of a good Friday.