Quotes by Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn

American historian, author, and academic

Alive from: 1922-2020

Category: History and sociology | Writers (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 23.

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident;
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. IV, THE LOGIC OF REBELLION, p. 132

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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;
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution FOREWORD, p. v

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 237

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. III, POWER AND LIBERTY A THEORY OF POLITICS, p

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 173

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 167

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 302

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 160

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 203

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 268

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 273

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. II, SOURCES AND TRADITIONS, p. 26

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. IV, THE LOGIC OF REBELLION, p. 138

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 198

• Bernard Bailyn

  

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  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.
  Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Ch. V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 225