Bunker Hill Quotes

“When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen’s deaths in Massachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why what was then a part of Virginia is known today as Lexington, Kentucky.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Part of what makes a revolution such a fascinating subject to study is the arrival of the moment when neutrality is no longer an option. Like it or not, a person has to choose.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“This is also the story of two British generals. The first, Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his government’s unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Paul Revere Jr., with whom I had lunch at Spanky’s Clam Shack in Hyannis, Massachusetts.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy of the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seem a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook. While Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“I see the clouds which now rise thick and fast upon our horizon,” Quincy said, “the thunders roll, and the lightnings play, and to that God who rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm I commit my country.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“is probable,” Warren wrote Samuel Adams, “that [Hutchinson] would have remained firm in [the people’s] interest . . . had there not been a higher station to which his ambitious mind aspired . . . ; in order to obtain this, he judged it necessary to sacrifice the people.” What was needed in America was a government in which “the only road to promotion may be through the affection of the people.” Instead of attaining membership in a group that existed above the people, the highest office in government should require an official to serve those people. “This being the case,” he wrote, “the interest of the governor and the governed will be the same.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution