24 Quotes by Bernard Bailyn

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

That is to say, their thoughts came higglety-pigglety out of the big, buzzing, booming confusion of their minds, too many pouring out chaotically in the same instant.

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

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.