American Revolution Quotes

“These are the times that try men's souls.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”
― Samuel Adams

“They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.”
― Patrick Henry

“Give me liberty or give me death."

[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]”
― Patrick Henry, Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death

“Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I Am Not A Virginian, But An American!”
― Patrick Henry

“Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarcy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
― Thomas Paine

“There! His Majesty can now read my name without glasses. And he can double the reward on my head!”
― John Hancock

“Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Beside, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of Nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.”
― Patrick Henry

“I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way.”
― John Paul Jones

“Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
― John Parker

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
― Tom Paine

“In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
― Tom Paine

“[L]iberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”
― John Adams

“The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable; and let it come! I repeat, Sir, let it come!”
― Patrick Henry

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their county; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered yet we have this consolation with us, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”
― Tom Paine

“Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families.”
― Benjamin Rush

“Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Remove yourself, sir!”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes! Then fire low!”
― Israel Putnam

“When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.”
― Marquis De Lafayette

“May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin!”
― Joseph Warren

“One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle.”
― James Otis

“Yonder are the Hessians. They were bought for seven pounds and tenpence a man. Are you worth more? Prove it. Tonight the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow!”
― John Stark

“Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.”
― John Dickinson, A New Essay (by the Pennsylvanian Farmer) on the Constitutional Power of Great-Britain Over the Colonies in America: With the Resolves of the Commit

“Since the American Revolution must climb uphill blindfolded in the long Capitalist night, any thing which was publicity became a walking stick.”
― Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History