Gordon S. Wood Quotes

#1. History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

Gordon S. Wood

#2. Once the Constitution became a legal rather than a political document, judicial review, although not judicial supremacy, became inevitable.

Gordon S. Wood

#3. But what is worse than all," observed the English traveler Isaac Weld, "these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other's testicles."31

Gordon S. Wood

#4. In 1812 the U.S. Army consisted of fewer than seven thousand regular troops.

Gordon S. Wood

#5. In monarchies, each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately.

Gordon S. Wood

#6. In 1788 Dr. Rush had told the clergy that, whatever their doctrinal differences, "you are all united in inculcating the necessity of morals," and "from the success or failure of your exertions in the cause of virtue, we anticipate the freedom or slavery of our country.

Gordon S. Wood

#7. Do not give to persons able to work for a living," declared a critic of the traditional paternalistic charity in 1807. "Do not support widows who refuse to put out their children. Do not let the means of support be made easier to one who does not work than to those who do.

Gordon S. Wood

#8. The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called "the world's best hope" for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise.

Gordon S. Wood

#9. Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.

Gordon S. Wood

#10. Showing oneself eager for office was a sign of being unworthy of it, for the office-seeker probably had selfish views rather than the public good in mind.

Gordon S. Wood

#11. In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.

Gordon S. Wood

#12. Only "those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves," said Smith, "have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.

Gordon S. Wood

#13. Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.

Gordon S. Wood

#14. Jefferson's extraordinary efforts to defend the rights of neutrals to trade freely drove the country into a deep depression and severely damaged his presidency. He ended up violating much of what he and his party stood for.

Gordon S. Wood

#15. Between 1803 and 1812 Britain and France and their allies seized nearly fifteen hundred American ships, with Britain taking 917 to France's 558.

Gordon S. Wood

#16. As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men.

Gordon S. Wood

#17. 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one," wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."31

Gordon S. Wood

#18. Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.

Gordon S. Wood

#19. Both Jefferson and Madison remained convinced to the end of their lives that all parts of America's government had equal authority to interpret the fundamental law of the Constitution - all departments had what Madison called a concurrent right to expound the constitution.

Gordon S. Wood