Historical voices

Reason and discussion, persuasion and conviction, become the weapons in the contest, and it is only when those are attempted to be suppressed that recourse is had to violence.

In those which proceed from the former cause, the temper becomes incensed and soured; and the redress, obtained by danger, is too often sullied by revenge.

In contemplating revolutions, it is easy to perceive that they may arise from two distinct causes; the one, to avoid or get rid of some great calamity; the other, to obtain some great and positive good; and the two may be distinguished by…

But where genuine principles of liberty pervade a people, every thing is restored to order; and the soldier civilly treated, returns the civility.

As soldiers have hitherto been treated in most countries, they might be said to be without a friend.

It would be better that nations should wi continue the pay of their soldiers during their lives, and give them their discharge and restore them to freedom and their friends, and cease recruiting, than retain such multitudes at the same…

The oppressed soldier will become a freeman; and the tortured sailor, no longer dragged through the streets like a felon, will pursue his mercantile voyage in safety.

When all the governments of Europe shall be established on the representative system, nations will become acquainted, and the animosities and prejudices fomented by the intrigue and artifice of courts, will cease.

The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.

The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think.

When another nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear.

By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe.

Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two Revolutions of America and France.

It serves to keep up deceitful expectations which prevent people from looking into the defects and abuses of government.

The horrid scene that is now acting by the English government in the East-Indies, is fit only to be told of Goths and Vandals, who, destitute of principle, robbed and tortured the world they were incapable of enjoying.

With how much more glory, and advantage to itself, does a nation act, when it exerts its powers to rescue the world from bondage, and to create itself friends, than when it employs those powers to increase ruin, desolation, and misery.

Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage, than any victory with all its expense.

If men will permit themselves to think, as rational beings ought to think, nothing can appear more ridiculous and absurd, exclusive of all moral reflections, than to be at the expense of building navies, filling them with men, and then…

Nations, like individuals, who have long been enemies, without knowing each other, or knowing why, become the better friends when they discover the errors and impositions under which they had acted.

Long experience however has shown, that reforms of this kind are not those which old governments wish to promote, and therefore it is to nations, and not to such governments, that these matters present themselves.

The poor, in all countries, are naturally both peaceable and grateful in all reforms in which their interest and happiness is included.

Reason and discussion will soon bring things right, however wrong they may begin.

The object, in all such preliminary proceedings, is to find out what the general sense of a nation is, and to be governed by it.

There is, therefore, no power but the voluntary will of the people that has a right to act in any matter respecting a general reform; and by the same right that two persons can confer on such a subject, a thousand may.