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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Light reading (by this, I mean books of little importance) may amuse for the moment, but leaves nothing solid behind.”
Like every responsibility in his life, Washington executed this one with the utmost rigor, claiming that a stewardship demanded even more care from a stepparent than from “a natural parent, who is only accountable to his own conscience.”
Washington blasted military rule in Boston as “unexampled testimony of the most despotic system of tyranny that ever was practiced in a free gov[ernmen]t.”
John Adams left this slightly mocking commentary on the verbose gathering: “Every man in it is a great man—an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.”
Sounds a lot like Congress today.
On the surface, Washington may have been cool and phlegmatic, but he was fiery underneath, blasting the British as “diabolic contrivers.”
According to John Adams, the Virginians “were the most spirited” people in the hall, and one Pennsylvanian said that, in comparison, “the Bostonians are mere milksops.”
