Quotes from Stacy Schiff

Few were innocent aside from those who had been hanged.

His enemies, insisted Adams, came in handy: "Our friends are either blind to our faults or not faithful enough to tell us of them." He knew that we are governed more by our feelings than by reason; with rigorous logic, he lunged at the emotions. He made a passion of decency. He was a prudent revolutionary. Among the last of his surviving words is a warning to Thomas Paine: "Happy is he who is cautious.

Everyone Has Wisdom Enough to Manage the Affairs of His Neighbors

Deeply idealistic — a moral people, Adams held, would elect moral leaders — he believed virtue the soul of democracy. To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace.

History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury. — HILARY MANTEL "I

His sympathies lay with the man in the street, to whom he believed government answered. A friend distilled his politics to two maxims: "Rulers should have little, the people much." And privilege should make way for genius and industry.

Judging by the edicts passed to regulate commerce alone, Franklin stood ready to conclude that "an assembly of wise men is the greatest fool upon earth.

Alone among America's founders, his is a riches-to-rags story.

Rebecca Nurse's, Mary Esty's, Elizabeth Procter's, and Mary English's mothers had been rumored to be witches.

Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.

the Nurses had raised a Quaker orphan;

He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds.

Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men's dreams.

All too often dissenters wound up named or fined. Fifty-two-year-old Samuel Willard, Increase Mather's only equal among ministers, had sounded notes of caution all along. He assisted the Englishes in their escape; he participated in the private fast for John Alden. In exchange, he met with "unkindness, abuse, and reproach"—and with a witchcraft accusation.

superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to go to spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain, and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade.

Without the character of Samuel Adams," declared John, "the true history of the American Revolution can never be written.

By unanimous vote, some fourteen hundred Bostonians, the minority of them merchants, dispatched Greenleaf to inform the acting governor that they were "determined to keep consciences void of offense towards God and towards man.

There are cities in which to spend a fortune and cities in which to make one; only in the rare great city can one accomplish both.

Witchcraft localized anxiety at a dislocated time, as atomic war powered McCarthy rumors in the 1950s.

Mary Glover, hanged four years earlier on Boston Common for having bewitched the Goodwin children

Samuel Willard

He argued—in a line for which Jefferson would get the dubious credit, speaking of a different revolution—that "civil wars in the political systems, like bleeding to the human body, or thunderstorms in due season, are salutary.

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with.