Bernard Bailyn Quotes

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.

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.

The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.

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 idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760s was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

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.

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.

On the evening of October 14, 1774, the Massachusetts delegates were invited to Carpenters' Hall by a group of Philadelphians to do "a little business."

Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, self-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.

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

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

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

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.