Are we about to topple what has enslaved us from the beginning!?
(media.greatawakening.win)
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As much as I love this quote, I haven't been able to find any primary sources for it. It's allegedly from a letter he wrote in 1802, but I can't find the letter anywhere. Would love to have that reference in my back pocket if anyone has it readily available.
Closest I could get was from Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (Suzy Platt, 1993), pg. 229, which checked the attribution. She stated Jefferson couldn’t have said it because these words weren’t in use during his era:
“Inflation was listed in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1864, but the OED gives 1920 as the earliest use of the word “deflation”.”
From there I double checked 19th and early 20th century Google books, and it looks like what she wrote is correct.
But if not Jefferson, then who? The question still stands.