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.
BERNARD BAILYNThe fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.
More Bernard Bailyn Quotes
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Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.
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Not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.
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It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.
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Instantly available without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play.
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The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin’s Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.
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The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought
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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.
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In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.
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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.
BERNARD BAILYN -
The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760’s was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640’s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
BERNARD BAILYN -
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.
BERNARD BAILYN -
What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues.
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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.
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The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.
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Everyone knew that democracy – direct rule by all the people – required such spartan, soul-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.
BERNARD BAILYN