Examples, Exemplars Quotes
The phrase “city upon a hill” was first used by John Winthrop in 1630 which is probably taken from Matt. 5:14-16 “a city that is set on a hill.” See related quote. It was then used in a speech by President Kennedy with attribution to Winthrop. President Reagan used it without the attribution and embellished it by adding the adjective “shining” which many people thought was in the original Puritan statement. The Reagan video and audio clip has been so viewed so many times that people think the phrase originated with Reagan.
There was, and still is in some parts of the world, this belief taht one of the main reasons for capital punioshment with visible and public executions was to deter others from comitting crimes by seeing the example of what happens to the transgressors. For these people, exemplified by this quotation of Dr. Johnson's, public executions are crime prevention. This notion tirned out to have been a fallacy. In England they found that during every public hanging, skilled pickpockets would steal from the onlookers who were tranfixed on the macabre secene--this despite the fact that pickpocketing was a hanging offence.
It is not clear that L’Estrange actually originated the phrase that politicians use so frequently. It may have been a common aphorism of the day and place. However, this is the earliest English written use of the statement that we have yet found.
This document was the first organized argument against capital punishment.
Referring to the Mexican War:
The President smoked cigars but never in public:
The Irish monks were loyal to the pope and were outraged when he was displaced by King Henry VIII. They were seen as a hotbed of disloyalty and therefore ordered to close. This is one of the many examples where an established government church dictated not only how people should worship but also prohibit other religions from functioning. These examples were well known to the American Founding Fathers and much of educated American opinion which was one of the drivers of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.
This statement during the First World War so frightened the Woodrow Wilson administration that they jailed Debs for saying it and other similar statements like {640245}. The statement was generally suppressed with few newspapers carrying it. The problem for the administration was that enlistments might decrease and force them to draft the wealthy and their sons which was, with very few exceptions, not acceptable to the “upper classes”.
