Quotes About The American Revolution

#1. From 1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation.

Edward E. Baptist

#2. Well, I am actually a daughter of the American Revolution

Katie Pavlich

#3. This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.

But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#4. The United States was born in revolution and nurtured by struggle. Throughout our history, the American people have befriended and supported all those who seek independence and a better way of life.

Robert Kennedy

#5. My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right, and do it with all our might. Let history say of us: "These were golden years - when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."

Ronald Reagan

#6. Obviously, a big part of the American Revolution was there would be no Church of England the way there was in England. There was a specific attempt not to have an established church.

Jeffrey Toobin

#7. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.

Abraham Lincoln

#8. The progress of the American Revolution has been so rapid and such the alteration of manners, the blending of characters, and the new train of ideas that almost universally prevail, that the principles which animated to the noblest exertions have been nearly annihilated.

Mercy Otis Warren

#9. This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

Nick Joaquin

#10. [L]iberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

John Adams

#11. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#12. Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.

Joseph J. Ellis

#13. What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done.

Edmund Morgan

#14. No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.

Howard Zinn

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

Benjamin Rush

#16. Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.

John Adams

#17. 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.

John Quincy Adams

#18. I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.

Gary Paulsen

#19. There were people who said the Society of Cincinnati in the American revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati.

Carroll Quigley

#20. My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#21. 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

#22. The American people are becoming more and more afraid of, and are running away from, their own revolution.

Leonard Read

#23. Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without the printing press? Would the American Revolution have happened without pamphlets? Probably not. But neither printing presses nor pamphlets were the heroes of reform and revolution.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#24. As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.

David McCullough

#25. I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up,

Larry Klayman

#26. You might say the first American Revolution was against the tyranny of King George. The second American Revolution must be against the tyranny of selfishness." This

Rita Mae Brown

#27. Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.

Matthew Stewart

#28. In Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.
The Second American Revolution.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#29. Nevertheless, to the persecution and tyranny of his cruel ministry we will not tamely submit
appealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free.

Joseph Warren

#30. Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.

Thomas Jefferson

#31. In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American people who make up the overwhelming majority of the world's population.

Lin Biao

#32. We should not forget that the spark which ignited the American Revolution was caused by the British attempt to confiscate the firearms of the colonists.

Patrick Henry

#33. One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle.

James Otis

#34. With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.

Arnold Beichman

#35. Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in 'worlds' just like our own.

Matthew Stewart

#36. Global political conditions make a direct American intervention difficult, but President Reagan's messianic and visceral attitude toward the Nicaraguan revolution could mean it will happen as an act of desperation.

Tomas Borge

#37. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

Kurt Vonnegut

#38. The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.

Calvin Coolidge

#39. Thank you American Library Association for naming The Gluten-Free Revolution one of the "Top 10 Food Books of 2014" Thrilled to share this honor with Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, et al

Jax Peters Lowell

#40. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.

Zoe S. Roy

#41. In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.

Thomas Jefferson

#42. If a British guy saw someone at the wheel of a Rolls- Royce, he'd say 'come the revolution and we'll take that away from you, mate', where the American would say 'one day I'll have one of those, when I have worked hard enough'. It's unfortunate we Australians inherited the British mentality.

Kerry Packer

#43. Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of July not only with exploding powder and shimmering flares, but with all of our senses.

Paul Engle

#44. In terms of the revolution, I believe that the revolution will be a revolution of dispossessed people in this country: that's the Mexican American, the Puerto Rican American, the American Indian, and black people.

H. Rap Brown

#45. In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

Bernard Bailyn

#46. These are the times that try men's souls.

Thomas Paine

#47. The American people understand that we need real change in this country, in my view, a political revolution, which says to the people on top, "You know what, you guys can't have it all."

Bernie Sanders

#48. The American revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in the townships and municipalities, took possession of the State: every class was enlisted in its cause; battles were fought, and victories obtained for it, until it became the law of laws.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#49. I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.

Howard Fast

#50. Let's remember that the revolution in Tahrir Square was not anti-American, it was not anti-Israeli, it was for democracy and freedom. That's a good thing.

Stephen Hadley

#51. The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I Am Not A Virginian, But An American!

Patrick Henry

#52. God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.

Joseph J. Ellis

#53. To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party.

Adelle Davis

#54. The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.

Thomas Jefferson

#55. Unhappy it is, though, to reflect that a brother's sword has been sheathed in a brother's breast and that the once-happy plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?

George Washington

#56. Our revolution in Burkina Faso draws on the totality of mans experiences since the first breath of humanity. We wish to be the heirs of all the revolutions of the world, of all the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World. We draw the lessons of the American revolution.

Thomas Sankara

#57. We began a contest for liberty ill provided with the means for the war, relying on our patriotism to supply the deficiency. We expected to encounter many wants and distressed ... we must bear the present evils and fortitude ...

George Washington

#58. Before the American Revolution there were frequent slave uprisings, and a lot of people would run away.

Edward Ball

#59. From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.

Gary Hamel

#60. The John Birch Society is Communism's greatest ally. With its help we will divide and confuse the American people until they have lost faith in their Government, their nation has ceased to be a major world power, and their country is ripe for revolution.

Nikita Khrushchev

#61. Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.

Northrop Frye

#62. John Adams, by then one of the country's founding fathers, wrote to a friend: I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.

Tom Standage

#63. 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.

Irwin Winkler

#64. From an early period, I had the happiness to rank among the foremost in the American Revolution. In the affection and confidence of the people, I am proud to say, I have a great share.

Marquis De Lafayette

#65. It was Jefferson's genius that kept the American Revolution from being sucked into the tunnel faster than it was. Jefferson had red hair. Nothing is implied here.

Tom Robbins

#66. But unless some great revolution in nature modifies the present relative level between land and sea, it may safely be maintained that the present outer reef is the final southern boundary of the North American continent.

Louis Agassiz

#67. I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.

Tom Morello

#68. The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

Woodrow Wilson

#69. Change represents the real spirit of democracy and the real America.

Bryant McGill

#70. By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern

Charles C. Mann

#71. That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Colin Woodard

#73. The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.

Charles Caleb Colton

#74. You can't learn 'bout the War for Southern Independence in any textbook. You have ta see it for yourself, and every one a you kids should, because the same country that fought together in the American Revolution for independence, turned clear against itself in the War.

Kami Garcia

#75. We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.

Hannah Arendt

#76. If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse.

J.M. Roberts

#77. What if hamsters fought in the American Revolution?

Colin Mochrie

#78. If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#79. The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.

Ron Chernow

#80. Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

William S. Burroughs

#81. If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#82. No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose The World Turned Upside Down.

Sarah Vowell

#83. My mom was a history teacher, so I couldn't really avoid history when I was growing up. But we're very light on American history. We don't really have great opportunities to study both the Civil War and the Revolution.

Owain Yeoman

#84. I don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough.

Grace Lee Boggs

#85. May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin!

Joseph Warren

#86. Would it be such a terrible thing for us to fall in love?" he asked.
...
"Ask me again in the morning.

Donna Thurland

#87. Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families.

Benjamin Rush

#88. No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ... support your revolution.

Harry Belafonte

#89. Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarcy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

Thomas Paine

#90. Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act.

Christopher Dawson

#91. If the cause is advanced, indifferent is it to me where or in what quarter it happens.

George Washington

#92. The Stamp Act was a direct tax imposed on the colonies by King George III. This act inevitably led to the American Revolution. Just as the Stamp Act did in 1765, Obamacare should act as a wake-up call. Chief Justice Roberts provides us with a similar call to action.

Rand Paul

#93. It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#94. James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

Jeremy Rifkin

#95. The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, and quality and of peaceful liberty.

Marquis De Lafayette

#96. Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn't belong to the White House aides. What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great?

Sam Ervin

#97. I stand before you tonight as a young American, a proud American, of a generation born as the Cold War receded, shaped by the tragedy of 9/11, connected by the digital revolution and determined to re-elect the man who will make the 21st century another American century - President Barack Obama.

Julian Castro

#98. Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

Bernard Bailyn

#99. Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.

Edward Abbey

#100. The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

Edward Abbey