Bernard Bailyn Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.

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

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.

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

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