“Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
(Full disclosure: We are very skeptical that Jefferson said this. It’s all over the Internet as a Jefferson quote, but there aren’t any citations prior to 2001. More telling, it doesn’t show up in any books between the 1700s and 2000. So we’re thinking it’s another of those made-up thing that gets swept along in the current of online information and just won’t sink out of sight. We’re obviously not helping here–we’re publishing it, and yes that’s Jefferson’s name we’ve attached–but we do like the quote. And maybe our third president did say it, in a letter or in the margins of a book, and the source hasn’t made it online yet. If you know otherwise, let us know.)
Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1800), via Wikimedia Commons
