“We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement … This was the real ground of all the attacks on you.”

—  Thomas Jefferson

Letter http://eText.Lib.Virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefLett.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=136&division=div1 to Dr. Joseph Priestley (21 March 1801); published in The Life of Thomas Jefferson (1871) by Henry Stephens Randall, Vol. 2, p. 644; this seems to be the source of a misleading abbreviation: "[Christianity is] the most … perverted system that ever shone on man".
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)
Context: Yours is one of the few lives precious to mankind, and for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous. Bigots may be an exception. What an effort, my dear sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through! The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement … This was the real ground of all the attacks on you. Those who live by mystery & charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy — the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man — endeavored to crush your well-earned & well-deserved fame.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement … This was the real ground of all the attacks on you." by Thomas Jefferson?
Thomas Jefferson photo
Thomas Jefferson 456
3rd President of the United States of America 1743–1826

Related quotes

Winston S. Churchill photo

“The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In Churchill by Himself (2008), Appendix I: Red Herrings, ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 577 ISBN 1586486381; “Commonly ascribed to WSC, even by The Queen (Christmas Message, 1999). What Churchill actually said was ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward’”.
The attribution of the mistaken form of the quote to Churchill dates from at least 1959 https://books.google.com/books?id=QN3hAAAAMAAJ&dq=The+farther+backward+you+look%2C+the+further+forward+you+can+see&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22backward+you+can+look%22.
Misattributed

Jomo Kenyatta photo

“I have no intention of retaliating or looking backwards. We are going to forget the past and look forward to the future.”

Jomo Kenyatta (1893–1978) First prime minister and first president of Kenya

(1964) Post-election statement. Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: The leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, Copyright 1995, Chapter 19, beginning.

Karen Marie Moning photo

“You can't go forward if you're looking backward. You run into walls that way.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

Robert Frost photo

“And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"The Death of the Hired Man" (1914)
1910s
Variant: And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

Edmund Burke photo

“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 274
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“I'd rather look forward and dream, than look backward and regret.”

James Van Praagh (1958) American psychic

Source: Unfinished Business: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Life

Charlotte Brontë photo

“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

15 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285

Matt Ridley photo

“Determinism looks backwards to the causes of the present state, not forward to the consequences.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 22 “Free Will” (p. 307)

“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”

Eric Roth (1945) American screenwriter

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

Edward Walter Maunder photo

“If we look backward, we seem to discern clear signs of progress; if we look forward, we discern nothing but the veil. Science is but organized experience, and experience of the future we have none.”

Edward Walter Maunder (1851–1928) English astronomer studying sunspots

Context: It seems impossible to believe that Life, so rare a fruit of the universe, intelligent Life, conscious Life, to which the long course of evolution has been so manifestly leading up all through the long ages, should have no better destiny than a final and hopeless extinction; that this Earth and all the efforts and aspirations of the long generations of men should have no worthier end than to swing, throughout the eternal ages, an empty, frozen heap of dust, circling round the extinct cinder that was once its Sun. If we look backward, we seem to discern clear signs of progress; if we look forward, we discern nothing but the veil. Science is but organized experience, and experience of the future we have none.

Related topics