Burgesses Quotes

#1. How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.

Edmund S. Morgan

#2. Give me liberty or give me death.
[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]

Patrick Henry

#3. When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider - in a county with only 391 voters.

Tom Standage

#4. A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.

Alan M. Dershowitz

#5. Jebediah was dragging Alyssa down, chaining her to the boredom and mundaneness of the human realm.
She must be set free.

A.G. Howard

#6. He had put them [his family] first by coming home [to India] and the irony was that they had put him first by arranging this marriage. He had walked into it with his eyes open. But his eyes had been open too long in the West and by the time he adjusted his vision to India, it was too late.

Anne Cherian

#7. Half Europe thought ... that with the Pope the Papacy was dead.

Joseph Rickaby

#8. He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

Lev Grossman

#9. For some unknown reason, bad-boys draw you in despite the fact that they are jerks.

Alexis Bledel

#10. When I see Liz Taylor with those Harry Winston boulders hanging from her neck I get nauseated. Not figuratively, but nauseated! All I can think of are how many dog shelters those diamonds could buy.

Doris Day

#11. Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic.

Jeff Lindsay

#12. The thing about lucid dreams is that it's not like the real world where you are constrained by all sorts of things, including the laws of physics-you can do magic.

Paul Davies