“Be polite to all, but intimate with few.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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3rd President of the United States of America 1743–1826

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“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few,”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to Bushrod Washington http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushrod_Washington (15 January 1783) <br class="br">1780s <br class="br">Context: Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence; true friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence; true friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to Bushrod Washington http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushrod_Washington (15 January 1783) <br class="br">1780s

“…I am absolutely not someone who thinks that politics is separate from the most intimate details of people’s lives…”

Kamila Shamsie (1973) Pakistani writer

Source: On how politics still seeps into peoples’ personal lives in “INTERVIEWS: Kamila Shamsie” https://bookpage.com/interviews/21570-kamila-shamsie-fiction#.Xc2ItmNKjcs in BookPage (2017 Aug 1)

“Such an intimate, promoted to power, was always lost. His duties and cares absorbed him and affected his balance of mind. Unless his friend served some political purpose, friendship was an effort.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

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“Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.”

James Ellroy (1948) Novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist

“I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.”

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Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I would like to thank first the vast multitudes who voted against me - and I have met quite a few in the last nine months, not all of them entirely polite.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

“Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eumemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today — but there are a few — would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines.”

Benjamin Page (1939) Professor of Decision Making

Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2017), p. 19

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