John Ferling Quotes

#1. efforts demonstrated that he had little facility for writing propaganda or even for communicating with a broad audience. No rejoinder was more learned than his treatises, but none was so unreadable.

John Ferling

#2. The surface causes of Adams's anxieties are not difficult to discern. Every activist knew the penalty for treason. Every congressman knew that prison, perhaps death, would be his reward if the American rebellion failed.

John Ferling

#3. Britain's decision to send troops to the city did more to change the thinking of Bostonians than any step previously taken by London.

John Ferling

#4. Jefferson subsequently came to believe that Henry's speech attacking the Stamp Act had been "the dawn of the Revolution."36

John Ferling

#5. By the fall of 1775 no one in Congress labored more ardently than Adams to hasten the day when America would be separate from Great Britain.

John Ferling

#6. Jefferson reflected, "I think of her (a college infatuation) perhaps too much for my peace of mind. " Nevertheless, he was robbed of his considerable verbal powers when he got the chance to speak to the object of his affections.

John Ferling

#7. To deal with what a High Federalist claimed was the "army of spies and incendiaries scattered through the continent," two acts authorized the deportation of aliens who were already in the country.44

John Ferling

#8. For leaders, wars are filled with guesses.

John Ferling

#9. Jefferson was the rare student who came to college already knowing that there could be joy in studying.

John Ferling

#10. The author distinguishes George Washington's leadership from that of another aristocratic general whose temperament was somewhat cold. Unlike him, Washington made the effort to at least appear to suffer with his troops.

John Ferling

#11. The author characterizes Hamilton's tone in the Federalist papers by saying that he never spoke of problems but of being at the last stage in the crisis.

John Ferling

#12. Washington had learned the secrets of inducing others to follow his lead. Washington probably knew more about leadership before he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday than John Adams discovered in his lifetime.

John Ferling

#13. Established churches not infrequently formed an alliance with the aristocracy , joining arm in arm against change.

John Ferling

#14. and a campfire for illumination. Usually a slow writer - he

John Ferling

#15. It was anything but reassuring to have to tell one's wife, in "Case of real Danger . . . fly to the Woods with our Children.

John Ferling

#16. Jefferson attributes to a college professor and mentor his lifelong habit of questioning conventional wisdom.

John Ferling

#17. Adams's proclivity for truculence and curtness probably emerged early. Uncertain of his abilities and laboring under an exaggerated sense of inadequacy, he probably fashioned such an aggressive manner as a defense mechanism.

John Ferling

#18. Alexander Hamilton reflected as early as the middle of the Revolutionary War that rallying at the last minute was part of the national character of his countrymen.

John Ferling

#19. The feelings of politicians are rarely transparent.

John Ferling

#20. Jefferson determined the lodestar that lay hidden in the motivations of others

John Ferling

#21. Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, every man would be an insulate being." Thomas Jefferson

John Ferling

#22. In the next two years he would sit on ninety committees, chairing twenty-five. No other congressman came even remotely close to carrying such a heavy work load. Soon he was acknowledged "to be the first man in the House," as Benjamin Rush reported.28

John Ferling

#23. He was convinced that public service and private misery were inextricably linked.

John Ferling

#24. Gates should have exceeded Washington as a military leader. He had long experience in a professional army and was more loved by his men. But Washington's character was superior to that of his rival, and it made him a great man, whereas Gates was merely a good soldier.

John Ferling

#25. Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.

John Ferling

#26. If that was not enough, Franklin also kept his exhausted younger cohort awake far into the night with an interminable disquisition on colds.

John Ferling

#27. The last officer named was Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island; a man of limited education and military experience limited to two years of peacetime militia duty, he nevertheless was destined to be the best of the lot.27

John Ferling

#28. Wanting to change only the British position at the top of the American social structure, John Adams feared that a "rage for innovation" would consume what was worthwhile about American culture.

John Ferling