“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.”

What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament’s constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.

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.

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

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

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.

Emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

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.

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.

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

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

The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution , there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I want to win four or five championship rings. That’s how I dream. I dream big.

Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

I am sure in some years from now you will see new posters with just white space and four lines in Garamond.

Since the age of four, I’ve been exploring what I can do with the written word.

After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquility of a political convention.

Ive only dressed in drag three or four times.

I want to be a Texan 24 hours a day.

Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, you will find nothing (no true religion) anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here (i .e . in one ‘s own heart.)