The True History of the American Revolution Quotes

“The sacred rights of man are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of divinity itself and can never be erased by mortal power.”
― Sydney George Fisher, The True History of the American Revolution

“is the condition of that people who have nothing else than the wisdom and justice of another to depend upon.”
― Sydney George Fisher, The True History of the American Revolution

“Moral obligation, moral responsibility, codes, conduct, life, happiness, development, and progress, lie again shows, grow out of this right of private judgment, this right of individualism, the great protestant principle, which within the last one hundred and fifty years has brought such vast advancement and comfort to all nations that have adopted it. No one has a natural inherent right to command or to exercise dominion. It is merely a privilege which may be granted by the people. They alone have inherent inalienable rights; and they alone can confer the privilege of commanding. It had been supposed that the sovereign alone had rights, and the people only privileges. But here were Burlamaqui, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Locke, and fully half the American colonists, undertaking to reverse this order and announcing that the people alone had rights, and the sovereign merely privileges.”
― Sydney George Fisher, The True History of the American Revolution

“They found in the principles of natural law how government, civil society, or “sovereignty,” as those writers were apt to call it, was to be built up and regulated. Civil government did not destroy natural rights and the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, it was intended to give these rights greater security and a fresh force and efficiency. That was the purpose men had in coming together to form a civil society for the benefit of all; that was the reason, as Burlamaqui put it, that “the sovereign became the depository, as it were, of the will and strength of each individual.”
― Sydney George Fisher, The True History of the American Revolution

“Natural society is a state of equality and liberty; a state in which all men enjoy the same prerogatives, and an entire independence on any other power but God. For every man is naturally master of himself, and equal to his fellow-creatures so long as he does not subject himself to another person’s authority by a particular convention.”—“Principles of Natural Law,” p. 38.”
― Sydney George Fisher, The True History of the American Revolution

“But Beccaria also stated most beautifully and clearly the essential principles of liberty. His foundation doctrine, that “every act of authority of one man over another for which there is not absolute necessity is tyrannical,” made a most profound impression in America.”
― Sydney George Fisher, The True History of the American Revolution