The Revolutionary Quotes

“To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Protests had been heroic, passionate, erudite, and creative. A young Newport woman refused to marry until the odious legislation was repealed. Other female patriots refused to do their part to populate the colonies, which should serve British manufacturers right.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Though it affected only one family, he believed the ordeal would be of interest to all; already he excelled at inflating a small issue into a larger one, of salvaging radiant principle from a slag heap of detail.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“But what does it avail to find fault with what is past,”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction,”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“He was unflinching, but touched too on his secret weapon, one especially valuable in 1771: “The opinion of others,” he assured his former father-in-law, “I very little regard.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Differences of opinion should not be construed as differences of principle.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“He excelled at friendship, which at its best he termed “thinking aloud together.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“There is all the same some truth to the allegation that — as one intimate put it — the American Revolution could be blamed on the Harvard College library.3”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“As his subject Samuel Adams chose: Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“We cannot control events, Samuel Adams liked to say. The trick, he revealed that summer, “is to foresee as far as we are able, prepare for, and improve them.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Samuel Adams was the kind of man you like to believe exists and rarely meet.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Any people who preferred “a wealthy villain” to “an honest upright man in poverty” deserved, Hancock lectured, to find itself oppressed.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“At the same time, was it not absurd to bleat about liberty when the province bought and sold Africans, “taken from all that is dear to them in their native soil”?”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“His former mother-in-law attempted to ease the new couple’s burdens by bestowing on them a wedding present in the form of a household slave. In a town where one in five families owned enslaved people, it was a traditional gift. Adams balked. “A slave cannot live in my house,” he declared, insisting, “If she comes, she must be free.” Emancipated, Surrey remained a fixture at the Adams address for nearly fifty years. In conjunction with a Rhode Island doctor, Adams began to formulate a campaign against slavery.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“A few columns stand out as Adams’s; he had not yet perfected his prose style, but he had found his voice. He is calm, deliberative, and precise. He is unassailably logical. The sentences are long; the embrace of the semicolon ardent. He did not revert, as did his contemporaries, to the exclamation point, or to long ribbons of capital letters. He trusted muscular reasoning to stand on its own.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Adams came of age, too, at a time when the Massachusetts economy was markedly on the skids. Plenty of other young men stumbled in finding their footholds. On leaving Harvard shortly after Adams, a future colleague would try his hand as a schoolmaster. Miserable, he sailed off as a merchant, later as a whaler. He was soon back in Boston. In a patched gown, he served briefly as a chaplain. Out of options, he turned to the law.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“A corrupt people would not long remain free. “He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue,” he concluded.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Let the people keep a watchful eye over the conduct of their rulers,” he explained, “for we are told that great men are not at all times wise. It would be indeed a wonder if in any age or country they were always honest.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“The censure of fools or knaves,” he would remind his wife, “is applause.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Adams elaborated. “Power is intoxicating,” he wrote, “and those who are possessed of it too often grow vain and insolent.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Thomas Hutchinson observed: “Power, once acquired, is seldom voluntarily parted with.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“Luxury and extravagance,” the adult Adams would fret, “are in my opinion totally destructive of those virtues which are necessary for the preservation of the liberty and happiness of the people.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“It was “the duty of every subject, for conscience’s sake, to submit to his authority, while he acts according to the law.” Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, “he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“A well-connected son of the establishment, he strained to find his place, loitering his way toward his future.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“History is that thing that, in hindsight, one always saw coming; a few seem able to glimpse it before it has settled on its destination”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“The right-minded were those who insisted on colonial liberties. Treason, he held, consisted of the failure to defend those liberties.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“To understand why the new president hoped to channel Adams’s spirit is to discover not only where a daring revolutionary came from but where a revolution did. His curious career explains how the American colonies lurched from “spotlessly loyal” to “stark, staring mad” in fifteen dizzying years, how a group of drenched, pipe-smoking Massachusetts farmers, fifty miles from Boston and thousands from London, might reason that they should act sooner rather than later if they did not care to be “finessed out of their liberties.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams