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Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn Books

Historian

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“For "as great a blessing as government is," the Rev. Peter Whitney explained, "like other blessings, it may become a scourge, a curse, and severe punishment to a people." What made it so, what turned power into a malignent force, was not its own nature so much as the nature of man—his susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement.”

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Book:The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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“Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.”

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Book:The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
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“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.”

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Book:The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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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.”

PeopleCausesLibertyVisionStandingTriumphRisingTransformingObscurityVigorousSustainingElevating
Book:The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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“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.”

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Book:The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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“What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.”

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Book:The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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