Jefferson wrote this to the scholar George Ticknor on 25 November 1817, while promoting a general system of education for Virginia: free elementary schools for every child, colleges within a day’s ride of each inhabitant, and a state university teaching every useful branch of science. The General Assembly was due to meet within a week.

His hopes were tempered. Legislators, he complained, lacked the information to grasp three truths: that knowledge is power, safety and happiness. The triad presents knowledge as a public good rather than a private accomplishment, strengthening the state, protecting its liberties and improving the lives of its citizens. The complaint carries an irony, since the lawmakers’ own want of knowledge was the obstacle to spreading it.

The comprehensive bill was not adopted, but the privately funded Central College described in the same letter became the University of Virginia in 1819.

Full quotation

“My hopes however are kept in check by the ordinary character of our state legislatures, the members of which do not generally possess information enough to percieve the important truths, that knowlege is power, that knowlege is safety, and that knowlege is happiness.”