American revolution Quotes

“It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American”

“For the primary goal of the American Revolution which transferred American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty.”

“I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality.”

“The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.”

“The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people,' who created the government that Americans still live under.”

“The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”

“...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.”

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”

“So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.”

“I really woke up one morning and said, you know, 'I haven't seen a good film about the American Revolution. And all the ones I have seen haven't been successful, but I'm going to make a successful one.' Well, I wasn't able to do that.”