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McNamara told the American public there was an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on American destroyers. "While on routine patrol in international waters," McNamara said, "the U.S. destrover Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." It later turned out that Gulf of Tonkin episode was a fake, that the highest American officials had lied to the public just as they had in the invasion of Cuba under Kennedy...

If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate.

It had opposed the Hatian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos.

In Los Angeles, a film was shown that dealt with the American Revolution and depicted British atrocities against the colonists. It was called Tbe Spirit of 76. The man who made the film was prosecuted under the Espionage Act because, the judge said, the film tended "to question the good faith of our ally, Great Britain." He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will...

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. (Con.)

Camps, or the blacks in urban ghettos, or the Indians on reservations—to the victims of that progress which benefits a privileged minority in the world?

Was all this bloodshed and deceit—from Columbus to Cortés, Pizarro, the Puritans—a necessity for the human race to progress from savagery to civilization?... That quick disposal might be acceptable ("Unfortunate, yes, but it had to be done") to the middle and upper classes of the conquering and "advanced" countries. But is it acceptable to the poor of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or to the prisoners in Soviet labor..

America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares that he might not accept election results cannot credible defend democracy.

If, twenty-five years ago, someome had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impcach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the US.

Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldviews are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain.

One thing that separates contemporary autocrats from democratic leaders is their intolerance of criticism, and their readiness to use their power to punish those - in the opposition, media, or civil society - who criticize them.

We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

But the key point is that the debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity. If that means the United States is founded on a contradiction, then so be it. With that one bloody exception, we have been living with it successfully for over two hundred years. Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776...

And yet the test of battle was endurable, as we have seen. in part because the Continental army shared so much with the people who sustained it. In the long struggle of the war, what made the cause "glorious,'' besides its great principles, was the fact that so many believed in it. As it took hold of Americans' imagination, the glorious cause became, in the popular phrase, the "common cause."

The army's will to survive and to fight on short rations, its willingness to suffer, to sacrifice, made the inadequate adequate and rendered the failures of others of little importance. The army overcame the worst in itself and in others. It was indomitable.

Covet! My Countrymen, and fellow soldiers! Covet! A share of the glory due to heroic deeds! Let it never be said, that in a day of action, you turned your backs on the foe; let the enemy no longer triumph. - Washington, battle of Germantown

The British presented a threat because they were corrupt as well as powerful. They had to be resisted with everything America had; if they were not, virtue, piety, and liberty would be lost. These convictions governed Adams's conduct throughout the Revolution.

Self-government, in this view, rested on virtue, on righteousness, and in the conflict the Americans confronted a government, as John Hancock pointed out, that was not "righteous."

In all the outrage and the proposals for getting things changed there was a sense that the Americans faced evil and corruption which would spread to their own shores if they failed to defend themselves. The sources of this conviction lay deeply within Protestant culture, especially the belief that most conflict involved questions of good and evil, and right and wrong.

Having to stomach a standing army in their midst, observe the redcoats daily, pass by troops stationed on Boston Neck who occupied a guardhouse on land illegally taken it was said from the town, and having to receive challenges by sentries on the streets, their own streets, affronted a people accustomed to personal liberty, fired their tempers, and gnawed away at their honor.

Protests against Britain marked a broadening of participation, a process encouraged by the atmosphere of urgency and crisis and by the fact that official bodies on all levels proved incapable of defending American interests with the effectiveness and passion a larger public demanded.

These petitions and similar ones elsewhere came out of small informal meetings, organized by men with no social standing and no offices but with their own interests and the public's in mind. For the next three years more and more such men took part in politics, or in those political activities directed against British policy.

The right of Parliament to regulate trade seemed just as clear—it was a matter of "necessity,"' Stephen Hopkins wrote. The empire had a center, England, and it had constituent parts, the colonies. To pull it together, superintend its commerce, and make decisions relating to matters of common concern were necessary, and Parliament seemed the only agency capable of so doing.

For Pitt praised American resistance: "I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest."

For the Americans in countinghouses and legislatures, if not exactly confused, were at the least unclear about what they were up against. They had not had to face a Parliament committed to taxing them for revenue.They had enjoyed rights without having to think about them. Unexamined rights may always be something of a luxury. The Americans were soon to think so.

On the other side, a care of the Commonwealth.

I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bound that lie between the one and the other. If this be not done, there can be no end put to the controversies that will be always arising between those that have, or at Ieast pretend to have, on the one side, a concernment for the interest of men's souls, and,...

Let any one have never so true a claim to all these things, yet if he be destitute of charity, meekness, and good-will in general towards all mankind, even to those that are not Christians, he is certainly yet short of being a true Christian himself.

People are not so easily got out of their old forms as some are apt to suggest. They are hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledged faults in the frame they have been accustomed to. And if there be any original defects, or adventitious ones introduced by time or corruption, 'tis not an easy thing to get them changed, even when all the world sees there is an opportunity for it.