James > James's Quotes

“There are very few men-and they are the exceptions-who are able to think and feel beyond the present moment”
― Carl Von Clausewitz

“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, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“These critics thought that the general commercialization of English life, including the rise of trading companies, banks, stock markets, speculators, and new moneyed men, had undermined traditional values and threatened England with ruin. The monarchy and its minions had used patronage, the national debt, and the Bank of England to corrupt the society, including the House of Commons, and to build up the executive bureaucracy at the expense of the people’s liberties, usually for the purpose of waging war.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Booker T. also made a point of giving lengthy interviews to journalists because newspaper articles were solid forums for his ideas. “Do you think the time might ever come, that any circumstance might ever arise, by which a black man might become president of the United States?” the Memphis Commercial Appeal asked him point-blank in a conversation about the future of the black man in America. “I should hope so,” was Booker T.’s reply.”
― Deborah Davis, Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation

“Hamilton used the sinking fund to maintain the confidence of creditors in the government’s securities; he had no intention of paying off the outstanding principal of the debt. Retiring the debt would only destroy its usefulness as money and as a means of attaching investors to the federal government.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Consequently, as Samuel Chase pointed out in the Maryland ratifying convention, the states would end up “without power, or respect and despised—they will sink into nothing, and be absorbed in the general government.” Some Federalists actually hoped for this to happen—for the states eventually to be reduced to mere administrative units of the national government.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“When Elbridge Gerry proposed in the Convention that no standing army exceed three thousand men, Washington is supposed to have made a countermotion that “no foreign enemy should invade the United States at any time, with more than three thousand troops.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“James Wilkinson, an ex–Revolutionary War officer, and tried to convince them that the future of Americans in the West belonged to Spain. Spain offered trading licenses to Kentucky settlers, negotiated with leaders in Tennessee, and sought to attract Americans to settle in Spanish territory. Spain even enlisted Wilkinson as a paid agent of its government. Wilkinson secretly swore allegiance to the Spanish crown and for fifteen years received $2,000 a year as Agent 13 of the Spanish government, an arrangement not authenticated until the twentieth century.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“General Harmar led a force of some three hundred regulars and twelve hundred militia northward from Fort Washington (present-day Cincinnati) to attack Indian villages in the area of what is now Fort Wayne. Although the Americans burned Miami and Shawnee villages and killed two hundred Indians, they lost an equal number of men and were forced to retreat. This show of force by the United States had proved embarrassing, and the administration was determined not to rely on militia to the same extent again.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, “It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“The Federalists resisted every attempt by Northern artisans to organize, lest their success, as one Federalist writer put it, “excite similar attempts among all other descriptions of persons who live by manual labor.”79”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Most basic and dangerous of all was the Federalist creation of a huge perpetual federal debt, which, as New York governor George Clinton explained, not only would poison the morals of the people through speculation but would also “add an artificial support to the administration, and by a species of bribery enlist the monied men of the community on the side of the measures of the government. . . . Look to Great Britain.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Private associations of men for the purpose of promoting arts, sciences, benevolence or charity are very laudable,” declared Noah Webster, but associations formed for political purposes were “dangerous to good government.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all the jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“Yet the Pennsylvania radicals continued to assault judges for their abuse of discretionary authority.“Judges,” the popular radicals contended in 1807,“very often discover that the law, as written, may be made to mean something which the legislature never thought of. The greatest part of their decisions are in fact, and in effect, making new laws.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Allowing unelected judges to declare laws enacted by popularly elected legislatures unconstitutional and invalid seemed flagrantly inconsistent with free popular government. Such judicial usurpation, said Richard Dobbs Spaight, delegate to the Constitutional Convention from North Carolina, was “absurd” and “operated as an absolute negative on the proceedings of the Legislature, which no judiciary ought ever to possess.” Instead of being governed by their representatives in the assembly, the people would be subject to the will of a few individuals in the court, “who united in their own persons the legislative and judiciary powers,” making the courts more despotic than the Roman decemvirate or of any monarchy in Europe.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“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, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Once the Constitution became a legal rather than a political document, judicial review, although not judicial supremacy, became inevitable.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“In a republic, they believed, no person should be allowed to exploit the public’s authority for private gain.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“In a republic that depended on the intelligence and virtue of all citizens, the diffusion of knowledge had to be widespread. Indeed, said Noah Webster, education had to be “the most important business in civil society.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“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, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“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, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“But the Nixon Administration gave the press an identity of its own, separate from the public interest, and then began to characterize the press either as friendly or hostile or what have you.”
― Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus

“Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“You wish to be anonymous?" "I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned--they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there." "Many can't go there; and many would rather die." "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“And, swearing that he'd let no English passers-by tell him what HE was going to wear, he stalked toward Piccadilly and into a hat-shop he remembered having seen. He'd just glance in there. Certainly they couldn't SELL him anything! English people couldn't sell like Americans! So he entered the shop and came out with a new gray felt hat for town, a new brown one for the country, a bowler, a silk evening hat, and a cap, and he was proud of himself for having begun the Europeanization which he wasn't going to begin.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol