24 Quotes by Bernard Bailyn

Every major feature of the modern United States – from racial equality to Social Security, from the Pentagon to the suburb – represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism.

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.

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

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.