Pat

“Good lord. I survived life on the streets and more enemies than I can recall and it comes to this. I have been undone by a couple of housekeepers and a social reformer.”
― Amanda Quick, Burning Lamp (Arcane Society, #8)

“The Massachusetts Convention declined to follow the Virginians down the tortuous rabbit hole of equality for me but not for thee.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840

“Proper republics, by contrast, depended on widespread civic virtue, citizen participation, and patriotism. In the best of such regimes, common folk informed themselves about politics, especially by reading newspapers; deliberated in good faith with their fellow citizens; voted in free and fair elections, with the aim of choosing the most able and virtuous; willingly obeyed democratically enacted laws, including tax laws; participated in juries and militias when summoned; and staffed elective and appointed positions of public service when called to do so by their fellow citizens.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840

“A second existential threat—slavery—was internal, subtler, and insidiously increasing. Human bondage, if not placed on a path of ultimate extinction, threatened to destroy the soul of the American republic. A closely related threat was regional polarization. As time passed, slavery shrank in the North and metastasized in the South. This divergence made it harder for the two regions to converse with each other, as the South increasingly came under the grip of pro-slavery extremists who disdained discourse and democracy and who would ultimately take up arms against both the Constitution and the American union that it embodied.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840