““When the boys were little, I used to take them to the gleaming white Jefferson Memorial at the edge of the Tidal Basin. Under the dome, we would read the inscriptions carved into the walls—the paragraph of self-evident truths from the Declaration of Independence, the four sentences from a religious freedom bill Jefferson drafted in 1777, the excerpt from a letter he wrote in 1816 (“Institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors”).””
![“That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society.” quote by Edward Gibbon](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/70c/edward-gibbon-710_barbarism_that-country-carthage-was-rapidly-sinkin_393.jpg)
