Patrick Henry Quotes

“But Henry was not prepared to submit. In a speech supporting his resolutions, he supposedly exclaimed, "Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third..." Before he could finish the phrase, red-robed Speaker of the House John Robinson cried, "Treason! Treason," as other burgesses took up the cry. But Henry stared the Speaker in the eye and finished his sentence: "...may profit by their example! If this be treason, make the most of it!”
― Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life

“The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.”
― Patrick Mendis, Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order

“For Patrick Henry, as for so many of the founders, liberty was purposeful. What some consider liberty today -- the freedom to do whatever one wishes-- Henry and the Revolutionary generation regarded as license.' -- Thomas Buckley, 'Patrick Henry, Religious Liberty, and the Search for Civic Virtue”
― Daniel L. Dreisbach, Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life

“Adversity toughens manhood--and the characteristic of the good or the great man is not that he has been exempted from the evils of life, but that he has surmounted them.' -- PATRICK HENRY, Letter to an unknown recipient, June 2, 1790”
― Jon Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty

“Many years later an acquaintance [Timothy Pickering] recalled [in a letter to John Marshall, dated December 26, 1828] that Patrick Henry once told him 'that he could forgive everything else in Mr. Jefferson, but not his corrupting Mr. Madison.”
― Jon Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty

“The rising greatness of our country is greatly tarnished by the general prevalence of deism, which with me, is but another name for vice and depravity....Amongst other strange things said of me,...I hear it is said by the deists that I am one of their number, and indeed, that some good people think I am no Christian. This thought gives me much more pain than the appellation of tory, because I think religion of infinitely higher importance than politics.' -- PATRICK HENRY, Letter to his daughter Elizabeth Aylett, August 20, 1796.”
― Jon Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty