Bernard Bailyn Quotes

Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.

Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought

Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.

The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.

That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred.

Instantly available without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play.

The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.