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, “Boston Massacre” oration, March 5, 1772. Image: detail of portrait by John Singleton Copley, c. 1765.
Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
H.L. Mencken attributed this popular statement to Benjamin Franklin, written in a March 14, 1783 letter to Benjamin Vaughan. That letter, however, has not been located. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations notes this was the motto of James Otis (Latin: Ubi libertas, ibi patria; the 1780 A Complete Book of Heraldry marks it as the motto of Daniel Huger, Esq. Many early biographies of Thomas Paine portray Ben Franklin mystically speaking these words to Paine. The slogan has also been attributed to Algernon Sidney, the forgotten founding father. In “Defining Liberty: An Analysis of Its Three Elements” (ABA Journal, April 1965), Wendell J. Brown identified John Milton as its author. Which is why we picture the great poet, above. Help in correctly citing priority for this great quotation would be greatly appreciated.
He [Anthony Weiner] might run in Alaska.* I don’t think it’s a good idea that he think about it in the next five years, but who’s to say what’s going to happen in five years.**
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), in “The backstory: Weiner’s final undoing,” Jonathan Allen and Maggie Haberman, Politico, June 16, 2011 07:23 PM EDT, as forwarded in an email to Hillary Clinton from Cheryl Mills, 2011-06-16 02:23, courtesy WikiLeaks.
* Allen and Haberman characterize the first sentence as a joke, and the next sentence as said seriously.
** This past June marked five years from Pascrell’s utterance. We may be now witnessing Weiner’s FINAL “Final Undoing.”
pictured, above: Anthony Weiner
We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.
Maria Edgeworth, “Preface” to Castle Rackrent (1800) in Tales and Novels, vol. 1, p. 9.
The penalty of misrepresentation and misinterpretation seems to be attached to every new idea that comes to birth through the utterances of genius.
James Huneker, in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1913), p. 256.
Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.
Maria Edgeworth, “An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification” in Tales and Novels, vol. 1, p. 213.
Socialism is but the further screwing up of the State machine to limit the individual.
James Huneker, in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1913), p. 364.
What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum translated by Steven T. Byington (1907).
Illustration of Stirner by Friedrich Engels, modified.
No man with a face capable of a hundred shades of expression can be ugly.
James Huneker, a portrait of “A Sentimental Education: Henry Beyle — Stendhal” [pictured above], in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1913), p. 2.
Alas, if man is blind, shall his misfortune be also his crime? I may have mistaken the voice of reason; but never, knowingly, have I rejected its authority.
C. F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793; second English-language edition, the Philadelphia translation, 1802).