Home > Work > Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
1 " Life was theater, and impressions one made on spectators were what counted. Public leaders had to become actors or characters, masters of masquerade. "
― Gordon S. Wood , Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
2 " Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. “The motives which predominate most human affairs,” he said, “are self-love and self-interest.” The common people, like the common soldiers in his army, could not be expected to be “influenced by any other principles than those of interest. "
3 " As Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the United States, declared, “As population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.”42 The leaders simply did not count on the remarkable demographic capacity of the slave states themselves, especially Virginia, to produce slaves for the expanding areas of the Deep South and the Southwest. "
4 " Only “those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves,” said Smith, “have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people. "
5 " Hamilton may truly be “the man who made modern America. "
6 " there must be some public fools who sacrifice private to public interest at the certainty of ingratitude and obloquy—because my vanity whispers I ought to be one of those fools and ought to keep myself in a situation the best calculated to render service. "
7 " Public opinion exists in any nation, but in our democracy it has a special power. The Revolution in America transformed it and gave it its modern significance. "
