Bernard Bailyn Quotes

The right wing has had a radio apparatus for years and years, so they've had minor leagues - they've had local rightwing guys who've become national rightwing guys, and who build slowly, and that's how it goes. We haven't had that. It isn't like we have a farm team.

ALEC is one great organization, I think, for growing future political leaders.

In government as well as in trade a new era came to the colonies in 1763.

The government that governs from afar absolutely requires that the truth and the facts reach its knowledge by every possible channel, so that it may weigh and estimate them better, and this need increases when a country like the Philippines is concerned, where the inhabitants speak and complain in a language unknown to the authorities.

In each colony in 1750 were to be found two sets of governing organizations, - the local and the general.

Iraqis have held elections and have recently put together their government, all encouraging developments.

When two countries are connected together, like England and her colonies, without being incorporated, the one must necessarily govern; the greater must rule the less; but so rule it, as not to contradict the fundamental principles that are common to both.

Santa Fe is a quiet little town, and is kept clean and in good order. The governor, Lopez, was common soldier at the time of the revolution, but has now been seventeen years in power. This stability of government is owing to his tyrannical habits, for tyranny seems as yet better adapted to these countries than republicanism. The governor’s favorite occupation is hunting Indians …

The sudden and abrupt departure of his Excellency John Wentworth, Esq., our late Governor, and several of the Council, leaving us destitute of legislation, and no executive courts being open to punish criminal offenders; whereby the lives and properties of the honest people of this colony are liable to the machinations and evil designs of wicked men, Therefore, for the preservation of peace and good order, and for the security of the lives and properties of the inhabitants of this colony, we conceive ourselves reduced to the necessity of establishing A FORM OF GOVERNMENT to continue during the present unhappy and unnatural contest with Great Britain

… the all-pervading influence of clericalism rendered good government well-nigh impossible. Under its influence the colonial organizations consisted of sundry independent jurisdictions, incompatible with the preservation of order in any community …. There was the church establishment with its bishop or archbishop, in no way subordinate to the civil power. There were the various regular orders, -- Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, etc., -- bitterly jealous of one another and prompt to quarrel, exempt from episcopal jurisdiction, and subject only to their respective superiors or to the Pope

The main purpose of stationing a large body of troops in America will be to secure the dependence of the colonies on Great Britain

America was not annexed to the realm, and … it was not fitting that Parliament should make laws for those countries.

The United States is unused to Colonial rule and lacks a trained body of colonial administrators and civil servants.

It is proposed that humble application be made for an act of Parliament of Great Britain, by virtue of which one general government may be formed in America, including all the said colonies, within and under which government each colony may retain its present constitution …

The 1857 uprising in India did not free the subcontinent, but it changed the way the British viewed and sought to govern it.

The Canadian risings of the 1830s obliged the men in London to think much harder about settler self-government.

Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.

In the past, the British had signally failed to build an effective structure of royal authority and administration in their American colonies. As a result, no possibility existed of soothing and winning over influential and talented Americans, in the way that influential and talented Scotsmen were increasingly being won over, by giving them increased access to state employment.

Forms of government become established of themselves. They shape themselves, they are not created. We may give them strength and consistency, but we cannot call them into being. Let us rest assured that the form of government can never be a matter of choice: it is almost always a matter of necessity.

In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons, but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.

The truth is that political consciousness in this country is pretty low... To the degree that we can help educate and organize people around the most important issues facing their lives and show that there is support for fundamental changes in the way we do business in the United States of America in terms of income inequality, in terms of low wages, in terms of disastrous trade policies, in terms of being the only major country not to have a national healthcare program - that's success.

As the condition of America and the world degenerates, it is we who are the weak or the poor or the ignorant who feel it worse.

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature. . . . [In] the formation of the American governments . . . it will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of heaven. . . . These governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

One of the things that the Hillary Clinton campaign has done, I think all the mayors in America would agree, is have a detailed plan about how that money actually gets down to the ground fast.

To form a new Government, requires infinite care, and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad.