Lord Byron Quotes
Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylæ!
Byron, George Gordon. Don Juan, Cantos III, IV, and V. Thomas Davison, 1821, p. 47.
The Poles were fighting the Russians. Pulaski was a Field Marshall. This was before he had come to America and fought in the American Revolution.
Sometimes quoted as "They fell in obedience to the laws."
The people of the American colonies were outraged by the Stamp Act which in effect placed a tax on almost everything operational in the economy at the time by making people buy government stamps to seal virtually all legal documents. Ingersoll had become the icon of the hated Stamp Tax collector holding what was then a very senior position in the Royalist government. The Sons of Liberty, today considered patriots, but then looked upon by the government as a groups of hooligan terrorists, caught up with Ingersoll and kidnapped him and took him to a house in Wethersfield. There he was roughed up and then given the choice of resigning his Stamp Act position or being hanged. He signed his resignation with this statement. The quotation and the incident is used by people who glorify the patriotism and the risk that the Sons of Liberty took for their beliefs. Others, use the quote and incident to illustrate that when such behavior occurs in countries today we often refer to it as terrorism such as in the Iraq War insurgency where the insurgents threatened government officials with death if the did not resign and often made good on their threat. A particular interesting historical story is Ingersoll’s son, Jared Jr. Unlike his Royalist father, young Ingersoll, Jared Jr., was an active patriot, serving in public office and was one of the signers of the U.S. Constitution.
No enemy had ever gotten close to Sparta. . See {632265} for a related quotation.
President Abraham Lincoln followed this speech with his Gettysburg Address.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS known simply as Lord Byron, was an English peer, who was a poet and politician. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement and is regarded as one of the greatest English poets. He remains widely read and influential. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
