Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.

Instantly available without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play.

Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.

The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.

The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.