- "When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress,
an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification.
This was the object of the Declaration of Independence."
--
Thomas Jefferson (author of the Declaration)
-
-
- "[The Declaration's] authors meant it to be -- as,
thank God, it is now proving itself -- a stumbling block to all those who
in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths
of despotism. The knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and
they meant when such should reappear in this fair land and commence their
vocation, they should find left for them one hard nut to crack."
-- Abraham Lincoln
-
-
- "If this country cannot be saved without giving
up the principle .. [of the Declaration of Independence], I would rather
be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."
-- Abraham Lincoln
-
- "The die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon.
Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish with my country, was my unalterable
determination."
-- John Adams, after deciding
to cast his vote for the
adoption of the Declaration of Indpendence
-
- "If we wish to be free, if we mean to preserve inviolate
those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending;
if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been
so long engaged and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until
the glorious objective of our contest is obtained, we must fight; I repeat
it, sir, we must fight ! An appeal to arms, and to the God of Hosts, is
all that is left us !"
-- Patrick Henry
-
- "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased
at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty Powers ! -- I
know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or
give me death !
-- Patrick Henry
-
- "I could not omit to urge on every man to remember
that self-government politically can only be successful if it be accompanied
by self-government personally; that there must be government somewhere;
and that, if the people are indeed to be sovereigns, they must exercise
their sovereignty over themselves individually, as well as over themselves
in the aggregate -- regulating their own lives, resisting their own temptations,
subduing their own passions, and voluntarily imposing upon themselves some
measure of that restraint and discipline which, under other systems, is
supplied from the armories of arbitrary power -- the discipline of virture
in the place of the discipline of slavery. ... In what region of the
earth ever so remote from us, in what corner of creation ever so far out
of the range of our communication, does not some burden lightened, some
bond loosened, some yoke lifted, some labor better remunerated, some new
hope for despairing hearts, some new light or new liberty for the benighted
or the oppressed, bear witness this day, and trace itself, directly or
indirectly, back to the impulse given to the world by the successful establishment
and operation of free institutions on this American continent."
-- John C. Winthrop
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