The Idea of America Quotes

“David Hume thought that even the Tories had been so long obliged to talk “in the republican stile” that they had at length “embraced the sentiments as well as the language of their adversaries.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States

“Moses Coit Tyler, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, to describe the American Revolution as “preeminently a revolution caused by ideas, and pivoted on ideas.” That ideas played a part in all revolutions Tyler readily admitted. But in most revolutions, like that of the French, ideas had been perceived and acted upon only when the social reality had caught up with them, only when the ideas had been given meaning and force by long-experienced “real evils.” The American Revolution, said Tyler, had been different: it was directed “not against tyranny inflicted, but only against tyranny anticipated.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States