Historical voices

You may, perhaps, be unwilling to be serious, but this destruction of the goods of Providence, this havoc of the human race, and this sowing the world with mischief, must be accounted for to him who made and governs it.

It is not the farcical benedictions of a bishop, nor the cringing hypocrisy of a court of chaplains, nor the formality of an act of Parliament, that can change guilt into innocence, or make the punishment one pang the less.

The poor reflection of having served your king will yield you no consolation in your parting moments.

The time, sir, will come when you, in a melancholy hour, shall reckon up your miseries by your murders in America.

None but a Herod of uncommon malice would have made war upon infancy and innocence: and none but a people of the most finished fortitude, dared under those circumstances, have resisted the tyranny.

To see the bounties of heaven destroyed, the beautiful face of nature laid waste, and the choicest works of creation and art tumbled into ruin, would fetch a curse from the soul of piety itself.

The histories of Alexander, and Charles of Sweden, are the histories of human devils; a good man cannot think of their actions without abhorrence, nor of their deaths without rejoicing.

One would think there were evils enough in the world without studying to increase them, and that life is sufficiently short without shaking the sand that measures it.

When we take a survey of mankind, we cannot help cursing the wretch, who, to the unavoidable misfortunes of nature, shall wilfully add the calamities of war.

She is the only power who could practise the prodigal barbarity of tying men to mouths of loaded cannon and blowing them away.

Her late reduction of India, under Clive and his successors, was not so properly a conquest as an extermination of mankind.

Extent of dominion has been her ruin, and instead of civilizing others has brutalized herself.

For the domestic happiness of Britain and the peace of the world, I wish she had not a foot of land but what is circumscribed within her own island.

When she shall be a spot scarcely visible among the nations, America shall flourish the favorite of heaven, and the friend of mankind.

And though the sufferings she now endures are heavy, and severe, they are like straws in the wind compared to the weight of evils she would feel under the government of your king, and his pensioned Parliament.

From such men and such masters, may the gracious hand of Heaven preserve America!

They have refined upon villany till it wants a name.

There is not in the compass of language a sufficiency of words to express the baseness of your king, his ministry and his army.

The soul of any man of sentiment would rise in brave rebellion against them, and spurn them from the earth.

What greater public curse can befall any country than to be under such authority, and what greater blessing than to be delivered therefrom.

Her conduct towards America is a compound of rage and lunacy; she aims at the government of it, yet preserves neither dignity nor character in her methods to obtain it.

Bent upon the ruin of a young and unoffending country, she has drawn the sword that has wounded herself to the heart, and in the agony of her resentment has applied a poison for a cure.

Never did a nation invite destruction upon itself with the eagerness and the ignorance with which Britain has done.

The time was when he could not deign an answer to a petition from America, and the time now is when he dare not give an answer to an affront from France.